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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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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.
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