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The Death of Licensed Enterprise Software?
tfsm writes "Andy Singleton wrote a short, interesting article about the looming death of traditionally licensed, proprietary, enterprise software over at The IT Manager's Journal. In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel. There are several causes, but one, he suggests, is erosion from Open Source offerings."
This is probably very true. I mean, recently I was looking into partition/harddrive/virtual drive encryption programs. There are a number of identical looking commercial apps available. However, TrueCrypt(sourceforge) offers the same or better features really. Honestly, if you have to choose between the free solution, which is a mature stable choice, and one that will cost your company hundreds of dollars per license.... well, it's not much of a choice, is it?
Great articles. No sales numbers. No real explination given. Just lots of guesses and assumptions my some guy. I'm impressed. About all I've learned is that Siebel's licensing revenue is down. That, and it's written by a guy whose job is to sell software to big companies. Wow.
I don't respond to AC's.
Do it Yourself. This is the keystone for future business success.
You don't run a business, do you? Any business person can tell you that this is 100% wrong. You should only design your own software if 1. Your needs can't be filled by off-the-shelf stuff 2. There's some kind of value or competitive advantage to doing it yourself 3. You can afford it.
Unless you're a software company, software is just a tool like any others. You may as well have said that the only way to success in any business is to build your own trucks instead of simply bying them.
I don't respond to AC's.
Rather than a product. The problem with software (any information) as a product is that there is no scarcity, it's easy to copy and make more.
Markets require a supply and a demand, to make any information a product rather than a service you have to find a way to limit supply of something which isn't naturally scarce, licenses, keys, dongles etc. Without these, limitations the supply increases to infinity and the price therefore tends towards zero.
You may not like him, but Richard Stallman is a bloody clever bloke. The GPL and similar basically eliminate the artificial scarcity limitations imposed by most commercial software vendors.
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This trend is definitely true in smaller companies. Why spend thousands of dollars on proprietary software when you can get an open source project for free that you can modify to your heart's content? Granted, you're going to spend time and money to make those modifications, but it can be worth it when you get exactly what you want/need.
Compared to 5 to 10 years ago, the number of open source software apps available now is mind-blowing. So much so that whenever we are researching and deploying a new application, we immediately go looking for the open source one. The proprietary version is a last resort.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
The commoditisation of software that open source represents is a rising tide. There are two ways to handle a rising tide: float or sink.
Siebel, like many big software firms, are unable to float. They don't use open source for their processes, so don't benefit from it. They are stuck in a niche, so are basically anchored to the sea floor while the water rises around them. Their customers have the choice of remaining anchored with them, and drowing as well, or cutting free and floating.
It's a bit sad if you're in the position of the drowing man. But it's been the same in Big Auto, Big Steel, Big Textile, Big Science, Big Pharma, Big Business... competition is a tough game.
The smart money is on those firms that learn to float. IBM, CA, Novell, Apple. Maybe Sun and SAP. Apparently not Siebel, definitely not Microsoft.
My blog
If you're talking about boxed software then support is limited to a "knowledge base" database and rudimentary and usually dire scripted phone support.
Out of the box commercial software pretty much like this. However, if you're talking enterprise solutions from Oracle, SAP, IBM, EMC, NetAPP, and even Sun (unfortunately, whose support quality has declined recently IMO) then it's a different game. Pay for a contract and you will get highly knowlegable engineers to solve whatever problem that crops up within the confines of the contract. I've been very impressed by IBM in the past. DEC used to have pheonominal support. So, while your copy of TurboTax may not get you the support you feel you deserve, it's not the same with big iron hardware and enterprise software. At least, not in my experience. --M
There's no free ride anymore, it's time to innovate or die.
Depends on which side of the coin you are on. If you are on the consumer side, choose F/OSS and it can be a free ride. Unfortunately, shrink wrap software companies probably are going to have a hard time paying salaries of programmers so if you program, you'd better start liking jobs where all you do is tweek F/OSS for "customization" for your site.
So let's see you hire some high IQ people and start thinking up new ideas and industrial progress will be off and running again after a short stall!
And if you're a shrink wrap house, you'll pay these high IQ salaries with... what exactly? If you *do* come up with something great, you'll have 100 SourceForge copycats within a month and they will erode your market.
F/OSS is the great poison pill of software. If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
I couldn't agree more. If you're not in the business of building software, you shouldn't be building software. Same goes for trucks, warehouses, cranes, desks, and anything else your business may require.
Hell, even if you *are* in the business of building software, you may well be better off buying it in instead. My company is a software house (we do web-apps), there's no way we'd write our own web server or RDBMs, we'll get one from a third party (be that mySQL, MS SQL Server or Oracle, etc).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
For example, when one clicks on a drop menu, there is a noticeable delay (up to 2 seconds) before the dropmenu is populated. The only reason for this that I can think of is that the app runs a DB query each and every time a dropmenu is clicked, even though the contents change very rarely. This is quite possibly the worst possible way to fill a drop menu, ever.
To add insult to injury, the thing is a "web app", but it makes such excessive use of ActiveX and other Windows-specific tools, it eliminates one of the primary advantages of web applications: Cross-platform compatibility.
To their credit, a rep from Siebel did say that this particular product was once a locally-run binary program, but Siebel was losing sales to competitors simply because their tool was not a web application. That is the only reason! Apparently, it didn't include a sufficient number of buzzwords, so they rewrote it to do just that.
How much do you want to bet they'll switch its data storage medium from a proper relational database (even if it is MS SQL) to a purely XML-based system? I am sure that will be plenty fast.
The irony is that this system was used to replace two systems that actually worked well--a OpenVMS-based control system and a Tandem-based logging system. Whomever implemented the old systems clearly valued uptime (neither OpenVMS nor Tandem/HP-Nonstop systems crash; at least, I have never seen it happen, and I've worked on such systems that have uptimes of decades), though admittedly both are rather proprietary and dated.
I've only used 2 or 3 Siebel products, so my experience with them is somewhat limited. Perhaps some of their stuff is non-crap.
Just goes to show--never let PHB's dominate your design decisions, at least if quality is a concern.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
it shouldn't be more expensive (even though, in the past, it has been). and the point of this article is that, in fact, software is getting easier, or else there wouldn't be so much open source software supplanting 'old-school solutions' in the first place ...
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OK, I run a retail store. Are you suggesting that, instead of buying a working POS solution for about $800/workstation, that I should make my own? You can't really be serious...
if your business is selling pigs, and you need software to control the sale of those pigs, it is far better for you to have your own, purpose-built, customized software for the selling of pigs, than it is to 'copy someone elses model'.
Why?
it shouldn't be more expensive (even though, in the past, it has been). and the point of this article is that, in fact, software is getting easier, or else there wouldn't be so much open source software supplanting 'old-school solutions' in the first place
Fine. Who do I contact to write a point of sale system that handles inventory, purchase orders, vouchers, printing tags (multiple formats), printing receipts (multiple formats), supports all major POS software, has integrated credit card processing, tracks customer purchases, and seamlessly transfers data to/from Quickbooks for $2400 (we have 3 workstations)?
I don't respond to AC's.