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Enterprise Software Sales Dried Up In September
CurtMonash writes "As I predicted a week ago, it looks as if the third quarter was ugly for software vendors, due to the economic crisis. SAP said 'The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter.' My old acquaintance John Treadway, who used to work in Sybase's financial services vertical unit, reports that things are even worse than that in the financial services industry, Wall Street and retail banks alike. So now what? Well, IT is a huge part of capital spending, and at enterprises that have to cut back capital spending, IT is going to get hurt. On the other hand, high-growth companies — Web businesses, analytic services providers, etc. — may try to power through the downturn. And the more directly an IT project affects near-term profits, the more likely it is to survive."
Right, if you are programmer and are willing to accept minimum wage, with no benefits.
Spoken like a kid who never had a job. Tell you what, we are a software company, and I can tell you that programmers cost a lot. Software development is darn expensive too. And you have to add up all the continual training cost for our staffs, not just the initial training to get them up to speed.
I hate to break that to you, not all softwares can sell millions of copies per year, certainly not enterprise softwares. You are not selling burgers here. A lot of companies would be really happy if they can sell 50 copies per year. Customizations, services, support, etc, all very expensive work.
Go to take a look at the "enterprise softwares" first, make sure you even know what all those terms mean (I'm not even talking about implementing them), and make sure you understand all the regulations/rules involved in the industry, yada yada yada... and then, we'll talk.
Short answer: Yes. If by normal you mean recurrent.
Slightly longer answer: The number has in the past been greater than 5 years, but recently we seem to be tightening the loop between boom and bust. Likewise, many of the past booms and busts have not appeared to be quite so catastrophic as this one.
I've been in the workforce since the late 70s, and paying attention since a little before that. I've seen downturns of various kinds in every decade.
And yes, the US economy is more or less predicated on a boom/bust cycle. But don't take my word on it; greater minds than mine have looked at the phenomenon. Start with wikipedia and keep going from there.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
If you're paying a lot of money for software odds are you are being taken advantage of. No software should cost more than $10k Exception: scientific software (and I mean the really advanced stuff, simulations, etc), math analysis, etc, etc AND EVEN THEN
Well, as much fun as sweeping generalizations are...
There is some fantastic commercial, enterprise software out there, the likes of which FOSS cannot touch. I'm a DBA and love Postgres, and to a lesser extent MySQL, but neither has the breadth of features or capabilities that Oracle has. Postgres is a great product, but it's like Oracle 7...there's a big difference between it and Oracle 11g. And yeah, there are a lot of shops that don't need that difference, but there are a helluva lot of shops that do.
That's just to take databases. There's a wide variety of engineering software that I've supported over the years that is just not going to be touched by FOSS people any time soon and represents literally tens of thousands of man-hours of development time. My employer uses some really intricate software designed for our old-school industry that would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop in-house...and no FOSS group is going to say "hey, let's do that in our spare time for fun! And also make sure it works with everything else!"
I agree that big ERP packages are often big nightmares and yes, there's a lot of junk out there, but you can't just say "if you pay a lot for software, odds are you're being taken advantage of."
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