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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."
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.
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!
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.