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:This just in-

[Jucius Maximus]

"Unfortunately (and I've seen this happen up-close-and-personal) the sparkly new features are quite often the thing that'll sell your package to the PHB sitting opposite you in the demonstration room. It's very easy to run your demo and say - lookit the pretty colours! This is what our software does that our competitors doesn't!"

True. IMHO, this is where a line is drawn by ethics. Do you lower yourself to the point where you are writing the flashy but crappy stuff that will sell your product to the PHB or not?

It's possible that I am a person who is too burdened by 'ethics' but I would rather get out of the industry than participate in such a disgrace to the trade. That is one reason why I stopped selling computers -- most people don't understand the evils of Windows XP and frankly I'm not willing to sell their souls to Microsoft for them, even if it nicely balances my finances. So I stopped my activities in a job and industry that were paying me decent money.

Razzle dazzle? Yeah, it will sell your product and make you money. But I don't want to 'sell my soul' or sell someone else's either. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Is anyone really surprised by this?!!?

[bc8o8]

I for one thought the over-priced, bloated, bug-filled software that the industry is shoveling out was the primary driver behind the OpenSource revolution. If companies aren't going to step up and write good solid code, we'll just have to do it ourselves.

the sad truth

[Cnik70]

is that I have to blame this once again on Microsoft who seem to add loads of rarely used features to all of their releases of products such as Office. Then they turn around and remove backwards compatibility for those who would choose to stick with older and less (but not much) bloated version. Companies hate to have to upgrade since this costs them valuable capital. But the liscense policies of corporations such as M$ tend to lock them into buying software which bloats larger with each release.