Business Software Needs A Revolution

An anonymous reader writes "According to a Businessweek Online article, today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would."

Comments

Re:Market forces control software quality

[JaredOfEuropa]

"There are some companies out there (M$ being the prime example) that don't add much in the way of new functionality, but rather repackage things, move buttons and menus around and make the new incompatible with the old. At the same time they only fix certain bugs, but leave others alone. Yet people buy their crap at record rates."

To be fair, Microsoft do add functionality and bug fixes to new releases. Few would argue that driver handling in Win XP (to name just one thing) is not a huge improvement over the way driverws were handled in Win 98. Despite the Fisher-Price GUI (which one can change back to the old Windows look, thank God), I'd say that XP is a pretty decent OS for home use. But would people upgrade to this new OS purely to get rid of some bugs and problems?

The market is demanding new bells and whistles. How many people would purchase a new version of MS Office, if it would look exactly the same as the previous one, and didn't add any new features? I've been to Microsoft sales presentations. All the people there, like me, were there to make a decision for their company to purchase the latest & greatest to come out of Redmond. You should have heard the Ooohs and Aaahs as each new (and completely pointless) feature was presented.

In fact, I firmly believe that new features and a new look and feel go a long way toward convincing potential buyers that all your old bugs and issues have been fixed. You'd expect the opposite... new features mean new bugs, but no. If you're in the software business, you might want to try the following experiment when you roll out a new version of your product: give half your customers the new version, but with the same splash screen and GUI as the previous version, and give the other half exactly the same new version, but with a different splash screen and with a new look-and-feel. (Redesigning the button icons will be sufficient). Then ask all the users to fill in a short customer satisfaction questionnaire, asking how this new version performs compared to the old one. Does it perform better, meet their needs better, has less bugs, etc. You might be surprised by the outcome...