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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."
I'd love to see a survey of how many people use the huge number of convoluted and complex review and version features provided by Microsoft Word. The addition of these feature seems to represent the only major change from one version to the next of this microsoft suite, nowadays...
One of the key problems is that software vendors think that they should continue to add more and more features. Each time a software vendor solves some little bullshit problem for one customer, they decide to throw it into the next version resulting is feature creep. This might be kind of cool for the geeks but it sucks for most users, especially the typical users of the software. As most of us know, as you increase the number of features, you increase the complexity. As you increase the complexity, you decrease the usabilty. Thus, paradoxically, as you help some people you hurt a lot of other people. Stated another way, the harder these vendors try to help users the more they hurt them. Usability just keeps dropping.
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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.
re-evaluation doesn't mean refund. It means lets spend more money and hope it works this time! (or maybe the existing vendor has an upgrade solution! we can use our relationship to get a great discount!)
The revolution has to come from the businesses who buy the software. And the sound of that revolution would be "I know what I want, I want a,b and c". Venders would be in utter shock, many will fail because they are not used to actually making what is demanded only what they think/know it should be.
To be honest, at least 50-90% of the cost of big software packages goes into maintaining another company, paying that company's CEOs and sales staff, paying for first level support people to misdirect your call and other things that are, to a great degree, unrelated to the quality of the software you're getting.
Think about it: for $100k, you can get package X, which does half of what you need it to do in some areas and twice what you want it to do in others. Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
If there's an OSS package that already does most of what you need, you can probably hire their developers to customize it for you quickly and at a very minimum expense. You don't even have to tell anybody about your custom code, unless you intend to release the binaries outside your company.
And of course, if you can get three companies that need a similar piece of software, you can invest in a small business that does exactly what you want and split the cost. That's how my friend's firm works...the bills are paid for by the big guys, and anything they sell on top of it is a bonus. As a result, their rates are 1/2 to 1/10th those of their pay-for-our-big-name-CEO competitors.
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The big business app vendors have mastered the buzzwords to impress the CxO's and boardrooms into believing they solve the problems. After all, if FORTUNE 100 software company whose software is used by everyone doesn't fix the problem, who can? The evaluators are shut off because the sale is predestined by the owner.
I saw this happen when my company evaluated a $2 million package by Big Software Company X and went away saying no way in hell. Then it came down from above to look into it, and $4 million and 2 years later it's still not done. The problem is, any project with that much money, and the big names on it can't (by definition) fail. So more money, more time, more frustration.
Of course, it's easy for someone so close to the implementor level to see it as management's fault. They turn around and see it as the implementors' fault for not doing it properly, since it works everywhere else so well.
They overruled the mechanics and bought the Jaguar, and don't want to look foolish and admit to the neighbors it's always in the shop. Articles like this are a positive sign though...
I work at a pretty large .com, one who actually survived the bust and maintains a profit, and has a pretty significant amount of traffic. We have used ATG Dynamo for our application server for several years, partially based upon the built-in ability it has to do an MVC architecture, personalization, pools, and so forth.
However, we just completed a web application that was built using many open source components, including Struts, Validator, JUnit, and others. By using open source components we have completely divorced ourselves from using the proprietary technologies used by Dynamo, and have opened ourselves up to the possibility of using a different, and of course cheaper, application server. This would not have been possible were it not for stable, performant open soruce initiatives.
Not only is management happy because we have (potentially) saved a bunch of money, but the developers are happy because they are much more friendly towards open source than closed technologies; it is far easier to get an answer to a question via Google than it is to pay for and go through the hassle of using a support contract of some kind.
I do not mean to denegrate Dynamo at all, because it is actually a fairly good application server. The licensing costs, however, just cannot be justified when so much of the functionality provided by it is already available elsewhere, for free.
Exactly what Jakarta subprojects would you suggest for building an ERP system? Or CRM? Compiere? Please.
:)
I just spent 7 months with Epicor (ERP and CRM), which is one amazingly crappy piece of software. But where's the open source choice? I mean there's not even a viable OSS replacement for Quicken let alone a ERP, CRM, or real accounting system.
If you want tons of consulting bucks, write a *good* open source ERP or CRM platform and sell the consulting/support/training. But until there's a decent *enterprise* choice, we're stuck with the crap from the vendors.
One IT manager told me "All ERP solutions suck. And whichever one you choose sucks worst."
sPh
It is actually a chicken-and-egg problem to see who is at fault, the buyers or the vendors.
Let's start with the buyers, and their proxies, the press. What is the easy way to evaluate software to purchase? Surely not to take the time understand its architecture, algorithms, efficiency of code, etc. and to fully test whether it works in the environment for the intended purpose. No, it is to compare features. So, we got the "Feature List from Hell" and the trade press replete with exhaustive feature comparisons. As if they meant something.
So, as a vendor, to what are you going to build and sell? Of course, you want to be the first to be out there with just enough of each and every feature have the most filled column in the reviews (it barely matters that the features actually work). Sure, you'll also make noise about the rest, but we know it is all Marketicture. E.g., Microsoft has been talking about the benefits of code reuse since the 1980s and implying that Office was more efficient because of common elements, yet StarOffice is about the only suite that actually implements an OO component model.
The article makes an example of Oracle's bad release of 11a, because it was rushed to market. They overlook that this is repeating history -- Oracle almost went out of business in the early 90s because their software was so fundamentally rotten that they had major lawsuits from both customers and shareholders. Obviously, even the industry leaders don't learn. Or maybe they do -- Oracle did it to gain market share, and it worked; at the end of that period, the competitors with better products were fatally wounded, but Oracle "fixed it all" and came back. The lesson is obviously: "it pays screw your customers".
Then, after years of vendors rushing to market and bloating their products with useless bells and whistles that one in 10K people might ever use, and IT managers buying it all uncritically, we then get a new phenomenon.
Consolidation happens, and a few vendors gain market hegemony. Some exploit this by starting to create deliberate incompatibilities. Now, the purchasing decisions get taken out of the IT managers' hands by the business managers. Their primary concern is compatibility -- "I tried to send a critical file over to Bob Jones at our biggest customer and he couldn't open it -- I've had enough of this import/export nonsense, so, damnit, we're standardizing on Microsoft Office for everyone!". In the mid 90s, the major sales forces sold directly to top management; the goal was to go around IT, and it worked.
By not being critical and business-focused in the first place, IT management lost what little power it had. They had become plumbers. Then, they got outsourced to India.
Add to that a collection of bad or self-serving decisions on industry standards, and the mess is compounded. We now have TrueType fonts used broadly, but the more sophisticated Adobe fonts used by the serious graphics experts because John Warnock would not agree to Bill Gate's demand for zero royalties on the fonts shipped with Windows. Or, did you ever have to contend with all the incompatible International character sets and code pages on a variety of browsers and email clients? Everyone talks a good game of international standards, but when it comes right down to it, there is no one standard that is actually used everywhere -- local code is still needed for every locale. And, there are dozens of examples like this.
And, of course, this is all happening in an environment where there the vendors bear no responsibility for their product working. Marketed under "licenses" that would make a pirate blush, they can peddle crap that would generate FTC prosecution for fraud if it wasn't laughed off the shelves first. Do you know anybody that wants any kind of serious device, like a car or a plane, running a PC O
You may have said "500" as hyperbole, but when we were trying to help on one Fortune 500 company (which shall remain nameless, and I can't name their product because you'll know who they are...) replace a legacy ERP system, I was shocked to find that the database record for each customer had over 300 data fields, slowly accumulated over a period of 30 years. Some of them no one knew what they were for anymore, but the majority actually had some obscure purpose in some dusty corner of their bloated bureaucracy. Each department predicted dire consequences if they lost their data fields, so the majority ended up being retained, with several hundred thousand lines of new code written on top of the modern system to effectively emulate their old one. It cost $millions to do this. This company was hurting badly because their profits were being eaten up by bureaucratic overhead as their market share migrated to the cheaper products of lean, efficient Asian companies. They're still hurting today, and I don't think they'll be Fortune 500 much longer.