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Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over
ZDOne writes "In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to analyst Gartner — which has up to now been fairly cautious, or downright negative, in its previous predictions about community developed software. '"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms,' predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a 'stealth' impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.'"
"despite their objection"? who are these people who "object" to using free software and why? No one objects to email and the web, but they are largely run by free software, as is pointed out in the fine article by Taylor. This position and the way they take it for granted is baffling. Do the majority of people really care what business model their software is developed under? Are there really people who would pick up their pitchforks if confronted with Firefox? Do non free software companies really enjoy such mass support that people would never bother to look at options that could save them hundreds of dollars up front and all sorts of pain down the road?
"technical skill required to use it"? My two year old can click a mouse and my whole family uses GNU/Linux without missing a beat and has for years. Our TCO has been far lower thanks to free software - we use hardware much longer, don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for fundamental software like text editors and things just work.
Gartner people understand things are on the way but really the tone is hostile.
It would be nice if some people who wrote some cool legacy programs released the source on those under an OSS license. I could think of half-a-dozen super cool ones in my field alone.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Every enterprise "using" something just means it has over 0% penetration. Just because somebody in the company scripts in Perl (which is open source) doesn't mean it's taking over.
Wow. Twitter is actually making sense. Look out for pod people :).
I can see why they would avoid specific instances of open source for these reasons -- e.g. using source code from GPLv2 licenses. But I'm not aware of any good (or even reasonably bad) reason for any company to avoid open source as a whole, on principle. Not Apple, nor Microsoft, nor Exxon-Mobil, nor Wal-Mart. A sole proprietor might have some misconceptions about security or a "nothing good is free" (as in beer) attitude, but this is hardly an enterprise.
On the contrary, I think there is a vast field of tasks where there is currently no good solution, open source or proprietary.
The assertion that there's very few tasks left is equivalent to saying that progress has almost finished.
Of course, your point is well taken: useful things that are already written but are falling out of date will surely be re-implemented by somebody else, better, given time; and then the original source code won't be so useful.
...Does this mean 2012 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?
If all or most software is going open-source, how does a software company make money?
Don't say services because services don't provide real cash flow. What I mean is enough cash flow for serious new projects and research. Service work has a relatively low profit margin because there is no way to "ramp up" as it were. You need people to do work and their time is limited. Once a piece of commercial software is developed it can continue to provide profit with only maintenance costs. Plus you can sell upgrades.
MSFT was trying to sell litigation fear over Linux, all the while the BSA was handing out hundreds of thousands in fines. Maybe there's an IP risk for Linux but positively there's a risk of a BSA audit. I've never been in a Windows shop that would survive a 100% audit without finding something out of compliance. Even the Death Star security shops.
Product activation, DRM, dongles and a dozen other ways the proprietary model has shot themselves in the foot. If you need capacity on an open source platform, just stand it up. Fast and uncomplicated.
And the only machines I trust on the internet are my Linux boxes.
I'm starting my new businesses on Linux from the ground up. All the money I would have spent on software can now go to more productive expenses...like booze and strippers. Okay, that's not true but it's nice to have the option.
Unless they're deductible.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Businesses certainly do see the value in having access to source code and being able to modify it to add necessary features or fix bugs quickly, but that interest does not extend to the sort of "everything is free to pass around like friendship bread" concept people have about free software. Most people simply don't care about the freedom to modify software and redistribute it for free, because most users can't even read code in the first place.
Is that the sound of chairs splintering I hear?
Have gnu, will travel.
We're talking about widespread usage of a very limited number of the total open source projects out there.
It's not like this means corporate America will fully embrace or even prefer open source products. It just means that LAMP solutions will be installed in nearly every company.
What is good about this is that it "pops" the bubble: open source software can successful. But I don't know that it says anything about whether it's an optimal solution for business. I think that's case-by-case.
I think what this is really proving is that there is a certain point at which a software product becomes a commodity. A word processor is a word processor, and for the most part, a browser is a browser. Certainly, a web server is a web server, and doesn't even differentiate on UI. Any changes to the basic template are going to be pretty incremental.
Open-source isn't exactly what you'd call the fastest or most direct method to produce a product. Nothing replaces real dedicated, paid resources. However, if it can create a usable product by the time the market turns largely into commodity, you're pretty much guaranteed adoption.
When they're all basically the same, free looks mighty good.
Yes, services! Services really do provide real cash flow. In fact, business like service so much they often prefer to convert to that model when they can. Service is an incremental cash flow that keeps on coming. Selling software is a one time sale.
Sure, you can sell upgrades. But you can also sell maintenance, management, and consulting service. You can even sell installation service (unless you make software that installs itself).
The risk of service work is not this lack of ramp up that you claim. Instead, the real risk is a higher level of competition. That is, you'll have a lot of others who can provide the same kind of service, including support service for open source software. Another risk is that if you identify a need to make improvements, you won't invest money in that effort since you can't use it as market leverage. By contrast, a service can be to sell the work of customizing the software to meet individual client needs.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't think its that simple. As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer. I'm not downing the OS though, but my point is, I am willing to pay for software (and probably so is many others) that is easy to use. A lot of you may say that Windows sucks, and that may be true (Vista is defintely not winning brownie points with me entirely), but a lot of people find it simple to use. This is not to say Microsoft is the world's best software company, or anything close. But what Microsoft and other for profit companies do better than FOSS systems and software is provide easy user interfaces, which can be learned fast. Anyone who has used any version of Windows, can fairly (with a 2 - 6 hour learning curve) get up and running with little to no hiccups.
And while I'll tough it out (to my extreme dismay) and learn Linux and other free systems, truthfully, I just don't like them. Simply because most of the time they have a "programmer's" feel to them and not a "user's" feel. On a postiive note though, going back to the Ubuntu OS, I do see promise and potential, and I don't say that lightly.
Regards,
MBC1977,
LOTS of people would object to "free" software, if it drove their business model into the ground!
Geez... are you the only one who has not heard Microsoft practically screaming in pain this last year?
What the Open Source community is really lacking at this point is news they do not want to hear. The news that filters through to /. is basically like the news as it ends up in China; passed through a dozen filters so that no one will find it disagreeable, and it will promote the glory of the republic. This is not a constructive way to deal with the world. Self-delusion leads to arrogance instead, where extra effort might be needed.
I am not trying to be negative here in any way, I wish the Open Source community all the best, but I think it's time to be more open minded here and not just listen to news as we would like it to be, if Open Source is going to move forward.
The reason for this comment is (besides numerous previous posts) the word "Admits" in the title of this article. If some analyst had predicted the victory of Closed Source, it would never have been labeled as such.. Please people, let's stay open minded so we can do what needs to be done, rather than celebrate while happily deluding ourselves.
I believe the author has some confusion about open source. Software development companies have positions on the openness of their own code. Most other companies just want software that works for a good price.
I suppose some software development companies "object" to open source code (especially to opening up their own code), because it threatens their business model.
On a side note, the nice thing about searching for "open source" applications as opposed to "freeware" applications, is that open source applications do not have trial periods. Try searching for "freeware tone generator" on Google and see how many trialwares there are. Now try searching sourcefoge for the same thing.
I hate trialware.
How about an adjective like "thinks", "suspects", or "predicts".
Nobody is admitting anything here.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The linked blog article is okay if you want a summary, but if you'd prefer, you can check out the complete document. Here's a PDF link to Gartner's full analysis: The State of Open Source 2008.
What I've found works best on such people, is not the open source angle. Sure that's great for us geeks, but the main thing I express to them is that Linux is free. Next time they wanna update? It'll be free. Unforunately this normally only works for people with older computers (and hence an older version of Windows), as those with new ones generally got a modern copy of Windows with the computer.
Every so often you get lucky with the "but there's no spyware" on Linux angle too.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Most commonly used are;
- Macthorpe
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renegadesx
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dedazo
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DAldredge
though there are others.I'm a consultant, so I tend to be exposed to a lot of different non-software companies in a given year. Which is to say, companies that use computers and software to solve the problems of their business and not as their primary product.
All of them are running Windows and Office on just about every machine they have.
However, most of them are also using at least one Open Source tool to fill some need. For many of them, that's something like Subversion running on a Windows server and Tortoise installs for the devs to go with it, but still, they're using it.
I'm planning on doing basically the same thing for my parents. My dad was quite upset with XP recently, he was upset by how slow and finicky it was. Sort of caught me by surprise. I'll probably put Ubuntu or possibly Debian on, assuming that Crossover office is going to do the trick.
Most users really don't care how the software is developed, as long as they can learn to use it and it does what they want.
Most people would rather pay for support if/when they need it and get the program, updates and patches free, than to pay for the software, then have to hope that the company is willing to support the program at that time.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for non-open software if it allows me to export the data into an open format, even if it's just a decent XML defined one. It doesn't matter much to me whether it's handled like moneydance or crossover office. Either way I can leave if I don't like the service with minimal headaches.
You'd be surprised how often you have the "free equals worthless" assumption in key decision positions. It is sometimes hard to get it into the skull of MBAs that this can work out. They are far too used to offers that are too good to be true, so their train of thought is: "Free, more stable, more secure? Ok, where's the catch? Because if it was, why would anyone still buy software that's less secure, less stable and has a price tag?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am fond of comparing Windows vs. Linux with the argument of VB vs. C in languages. In Windows, as well as in VB, you can quickly start getting stuff done. The learning curve is quite gentle, and you have quick success getting "something" up and running. And while the guy with Linux is still trying to get his networking up (or that C programmer tries to get that message loop sorted out), you're already surfing, playing and listening to music (or, in VB, you already have a nice looking interface that you patched together with a few easy mouseclicks).
After a while, though, it turns around. Frustration sets in, for the Windows user as well as for the VB programmer. A lot of the things you want to do simply don't work. Or are hard to pull off. You start to see the shortcomings in your OS (or language), you look over to the other guy and see how easily he can pull off what would be a major feat for you (try to do a full HD backup and compress it at the same time in Windows, something that's a very trivial matter with dd and bzip in Linux, or compare it to any kind of pointer operation in the programming analogy).
You start being pissed at your system (or language), you start envying the guy you belittled earlier for his choice of the "needlessly complex" tool. And generally, you'll be dissatisfied in the long run.
That's pretty much how I see it. Yes, the learning curve is still a bit more steep for Linux (although it has mellowed out a DAMN lot, especially with the advent of udev which makes the "now, which chipset do I have..." guessworking no longer the primary source of frustration during setup), but you'll be frustrated the first month of usage, then it's like floating on air. Not the other way 'round.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over"
No. That's not what he says. He says that in four years, 90% of business will use open-source directly or in embedded devices. So in four years, if 90% of business have one guy with an Android phone, he will be right.
I don't see why I even come to Slashdot anymore. I used to like it because it was less bullshit than Digg, but now it's the exact opposite. What the fuck are the editors doing these days? Every other article I read is a quote taken out of context to mean "OPEN-SOURCE WINS EPIC LULZ."
As for legal and business reason - that will be a sure way to be left behind and get excessive costs mounting without any gain.
One problem for open source in the future will be patent trolls. Maybe it's time to go troll hunting and see if they have collected a stash of gold that can be put to better use.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The Aruba access points do not run linux. The Aruba mobility controllers do though.
32303036 204D5620 41677573 74612042 72757461 6C652039 31307320 53696C76 65722F52 656400
I, for one, want a company to be held responsible for bugs in the code I use.
The sound you hear in the background is laughter coming from the vicinity of Redmond. Our software caused your database to fall down and go poof, and with it your whole company because you couldn't fulfill your orders? Gee. Too bad. Responsible? Read the EULA, dunno who, but certainly not us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm calling bullshit.
I am a user of Windows, OS X, and Linux. I make my living as a Windows admin--which I do *damn* well I might add--have found Xubuntu to be a great option for very low end machines (I converted my neighbor to Linux as a fun project) and find OS X to be my OS of choice on a laptop. I have experience working with each of the OS's, and have used both Windows and Ubuntu Server products and I can say, without a doubt, that your statement is not only elitist, but very, very stupid.
Tell me, oh mighty AC, why it is imperative that I know how to manually configure AD structure by hacking my way through a tool like ADSI Edit, when I can just use the standard Active Directory snap-ins?
Why should I, as a Windows Admin, have to know precisely how to edit various INI files and the system registry to change settings, when I can just click something in a GUI?
Why should I, as a Windows Admin, have to write an incredibly long and painfully meticulous netsh command to allow something past my firewall when I can just click my way to network settings?
I won't because I DON'T FUCKING HAVE TO!
Step back a second, and ask all of those questions with their Linux counterparts. The answer turns into "BECAUSE THERE IS NO OTHER RELIABLE AND UNIFORM WAY TO DO SO."
When it comes down to it, setting up a Linux server in a nice, secure fashion is a royal pain in the ass. You have to type MILES of command lines and edit scores of
Furthermore, that lower learning curve to becoming a Windows admin has--you guessed it--created more Windows admins! If a Linux admin needs to worship at Torvalds' feet and perpetually keep an eye out for him on the street so he can give Torvalds the obligatory blowjob he deserves for creating such a wonderful kernel, that makes a good Linux admin harder to come by! Therefore, a competent Linux admin suddenly costs more money to hire because of his greater skill set and lower availability. If you can, however, hire a SINGLE Windows God in a medium to large business, who can delegate tasks to people who are lower on the food chain (like the ones who can click "Next..Next..Finish" but not use ADSI Edit), your maintenance costs go down...
Run a Linux server? No thank you. I'll take Windows---not because I'm an incompetent Network admin, but because I don't fucking hate myself.
Oh, that and Exchange.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I slammed together a really quite sophisticated robotic scanner controller processing unit for my own company, which I will now shamelessly plug in case any of you need to get custom 20-ton steel castings, give us a call, heck you never know. WHEMCO
My unit uses the V4L Linux kernel API to run a frame grabber unit. I don't know of any way to run it under Windows except writing some kind of customized TWAIN driver or somesuch bull that will never happen. My Linux system works *right now* and has been demonstrated to company executives who said things like "this is fucking amazing!"
I ordered some hardware to build the actual prototype, and IT has shut me down. They are whining about all kinds of things like "who is going to support it?"
Hey, when I welded together the robot arms, IT didn't ask me who would "support it." Why should it be any different with my brainbox unit. Face it, those guys will *NEVER* be able to write or understand anything like this. If the program has a cos() call in it, they are done.
Clickety Click
You don't care if the company sells you proprietary or open source code. You just care about guaranteed support and some penalties to the vendor if it is not provided. Open source companies have more incentive to offer support since they can not just sell the code itself.
I suggest you consult Mr P.T Barnum:
"There's one born every minute"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Reliable and uniform -- not the words I would have have used in context of windows administration. The problem with windows administration (and I mostly mean 3rd party server software, but also Microsoft stuff) is that often the GUI is the only sane way to do things -- the cli interface, if it exists, is an afterthought. So automating anything is impossible or hard and debugging problems becomes a game of guesswork.
Yeah, that may be an unfair extrapolation from my experience that includes some fairly bad software vendors and it might even be outdated (as I haven't touched windows in years). Still, that is one of the reasons I prefer not to have anything to do with Windows, at home or at work.
While "free equally worthless" is a common fallacy, there are other reasons to want proprietary code. I, for one, want a company to be held responsible for bugs in the code I use.
Good luck trying that with a typical piece of proprietary software. In order to stand any chance of doing this you'd need to take the company to court and win.
If there's a bug I want to be able to outsource the patch in the form of paying for it.
Which is something you can easily do with open source. With proprietary software you face both technical and legal issues even trying.
Very succinctly said. Anything that is hackable* or complex has a learning curve, but it's worth it. I have another example to throw out. If you get past the initial steep curve of emacs**, it is quite a wonderful tool. I'm sure the same can be said for vi[m] and have no interest in hijacking this into a flamewar. In the past, I used anjuta and other IDEs. Being able to quickly split the screen to see code side-by-side in emacs is wonderful.
I'm sure you could do the same in IDEs but I have yet to find one that doesn't require a mouse. And I typically do run emacs in x-windows. It's just that a lot of things are faster with the keyboard instead of the mouse. CLI versus point-and-click is yet another example.
* I use hack in the traditional sense above being able to, what I call, tinker.
** this applies to microemacs as well which I actually use
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
On a side note, the nice thing about searching for "open source" applications as opposed to "freeware" applications, is that open source applications do not have trial periods. Try searching for "freeware tone generator" on Google and see how many trialwares there are. Now try searching sourcefoge for the same thing.
You tend to find the same thing on sites specifcially carrying Windows "free" software. There can be all types of shareware, nagware, crippleware, trialware, free only to certain types of users, etc. With what could be genuinely described as "freeware (including OSS) being in a hard to find minority.
A possible reason for people being uncertain about "free software" is that if they are familiar with software for proprietary systems "free" is a very much abused term.
You know what else brings maintenance costs down? Not having to hire clickers because you have sane software! You may be knowledgeable in Windows, you are profoundly ignorant of Linux, but you are not a good sysadmin. Because you think having people doing the work of computers is something that shows the superiority of your platform of choice. Of course large tasks require teams, of course you have to make it work and this is how its done. But don't come to a professional forum proud of holding your system together with chewing gum.
Yes, sysadmins delegate. When you delegate to the computer, you're doing it right. When you delegate to humans, you're doing it somewhere between half-wrong and wrong.
Furthermore, the very distortion of your perspective that led you here is the result of the use of your baroque, under-engineered, single-user platform. Finally, the notion you propose of a Windows God running a large business system's is hilarious. A Linux God, MAYBE, and that's because *nix was designed for such use. You might as well claim a mechanic god can fix all the cars in the world. And btw, i know enough Windows administration to assure you that occasional trips to the registry are unavoidable, Mr. Windows Admin.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
You're reasoning is also a very common fallacy...
Software almost always comes with NO GUARANTEES, wether you pay for it or not (read the license agreements)... And the supplier is under NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to fix any bugs.
With proprietary code, you have a single vendor who *could* fix the bug for you, but they are under no obligation to do so or to charge you a fair price for doing so. They can turn around and refuse to fix the bug, or charge you a billion dollars for doing it, leaving you with no other option.
By contrast, open source code can be fixed by multiple parties, assuming you bought a supported package of open source software from eg RedHat you can go there first... Failing that, you can *always* pay third party programmers to fix the bugs for you.
While your requirements are completely valid, the logical course of action with such requirements is open source.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Why should you pay for the software *and* the support?
Why should you be forced to obtain support from the same company who wrote the software?
You want supported open source software? Give IBM, Sun, HP, SGI, Novell, RedHat, or many other companies a call.
And since theres multiple vendors, there's competition, and competition is good for the consumer.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
My daughter is 11. I installed Edubuntu on the "pony" she got for Christmas, her first computer. She loves it, Edubuntu has plenty edutainment software for her to play with. I highly recommend Edubuntu for children and educators.
All your source are belong to us.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
A company may have 3000 Windows systems running Office and one Linux-based router, and they will be 'using open source in direct or embedded form'.
Except that they're too late. I doubt there's a business in America that isn't using open source, one way or another. Even if they have nothing but Windows in-house: (oh, and what the hell are the "technical, business, or legal reasons" to reject open source?)
Nicely summarized. I've also seen it written as a single line: "VB makes the first 90% easy by making the last 10% impossible."
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I don't think its that simple. As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer. I'm not downing the OS though, but my point is, I am willing to pay for software (and probably so is many others) that is easy to use.
So, you're saying you're taking an eight year old computer and you erase the operating system that your daughter likes and replace it with one that you yourself hate, that she has never used and didn't ask for, and that probably doesn't run any of the software she likes or is used to. And then you force your 10 year old daughter to use it. And because she complains about that, you conclude that Linux is less usable than Windows.
Your "experiment" tells us nothing about the relative usability of Windows and Linux. All it tells us is that you really aren't very smart.
Your "shortcomings" come from not understanding the tools available. To use your examples if you wanted to do a full backup and have it use compression- you're in luck- every backup uses compression. Want to do it from the command line but don;t know how? Try "command line backup" under help and support. Want to use pointers in VB. Look at byref, if that's not going to accomplish what you want do a google search for pointers vb ( or vb.net if you prefer) however pointers are inherently unsafe (which is why they are more difficult to implement in VB since there is no real need for them) but they are available should you have to use them to interop with com objects that require pointers.
Linux in general is needlessly complex, to use your example knowing that dd can be used for backups is a battle in itself. googling for "linux backup" dd doesn't make the top 5 hits and one hit from linux magazine (linux backup primer) says "Linux backups can be quite intimidating
Well .NET is a pretty decent class library as far as those go. Microsoft has never denied that it was strongly influenced by java's class library, but it is still rather difficult to design a good class library at all, let alone one usable in multiple languages, and a common run-time system. For what .NET it does it fairly well.
As for Visual Studio, it is a damn good IDE, and is arguably slightly nicer than even the best FOSS IDE, Eclipse. (Though it is also lacking some of Eclipse's nicer features). The truth is though that the FOSS community does not use IDE's very much, so having one that is excellent is really not a top concern.
As far as quality of the compiler itself, the GCC compiler family is unquestionably superior to Microsoft's compilers.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Which is why you submit the code back to the original project. Then an upgrade just works. It's not a terribly hard concept to get.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Wait... you couldn't figure out how to install Flash on Ubuntu 7.10 after TWO HOURS?
The 5th result when you search google for "flash ubuntu 7.10" is this. You read through it, enable the Restricted Repositories in Synaptic, and then just install flash.
I think you may find that this is enlightening. It boils down to this: Linux is NOT Windows. Trying to treat it like Windows sets you up for failure. You don't try to drive your car like you ride your bike, do you?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"And after you modify your source version of the code, congratulations, upgrading to the next version is at best case going to require careful thought and planning, and at worst case a lot of time and effort on your part."
And even then you end up on a wining position.
In the first case you would have a relaxed upgrade path (hey, we all know all privative-licensed programs are always a breeze to upgrade, don't we?) *but* the software *still* will have the bug: remember that the case was about a privative-licensed software whose owner didn't want to provide a bugfix vs. an open-licensed software whose primary provider didn't want to provide a bugfix.
In the second case you still would have two valuable options:
1) Provide the bugfix to the upstream vendor *even* if it didn't want to produce it itself. The upstream vendor might want to patch the main line after the hard work is done (after all, it will probably benefit their other clients).
2) Assess a cost-benefit analysis: is the bugfix valuable enough for all the hassle of patching new versions? If it is valuable enough, you still win versus the option of no bugfix at all, and if it isn't worth the effort you still are no *worse* than in the very begining.
So, again, even using arguments from closed-source minions open source arises as a win-win proposition.
"The danger of customizing your open source product is the same danger that companies face modifying products like SAP"
This is quite off-topic, but HA! is SAP what you are talking about? Is there any company that uses SAP as-is? Heck, is even SAP meant to be working out-of-the-box in any case? Of course upgrading will be expensive but in the case of SAP it is out from a well thougth strategy where SAP is more focused on SAP itself and its consultants, knowing they work by their side about getting enough gullible CxOs to make their day. SAP is *all* about being expensive and CxO marketable.