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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."
I think people are putting off some investments while they wait to see when will the next Microsoft OS come out. People are afraid to replace something that's more or less working with something that has been so criticized as Vista.
... an upswing in the use of in-house customized solutions based on FOSS for new ventures that want to cut costs ?
I think this bust is much, much worse than the dot bomb. Dot bomb, despite all its excess, produced wide-spread internet coverage, computer as utility/appliance, web tech/commerce, and much improved communication infrastructure. This bubble was a sheer paper and real estate speculation - the only thing left are vandalized McMansions in locations unsuitable both ecologically as well as economically. All with borrowed foreign capital that will surely change the dollar's place as the undisputed foreign reserve currency.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Good news for F/OSS which can provide functionality and flexibility for companies at lower prices.
Bad news for expensive software packages, esp. low quality packages.
Good news for software that can provide years of functionality and ROI.
Bad news for brittle and inflexible software tha requires constant maintenance or an upgrade treadmill, i.e. no ROI.
Good news for lean software which can run on older, leaner and less expensive software.
Bad news for software which requires major hardware upgrades.
Maybe a bit of sense and sanity appear in purchasing or building software.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Training is a once off cost. License fee's come round every year. Free software tends to make up for itself after a few years, the only real impediment to moving is 1. US style CEO's dont think past the current quarter, 2. the current system is good enough (although MS is trying to change that with Vista)
If Mary is a CPA or has some accounting knowledge then she's smart enough to realise that if she doesn't learn she'll be looking for a new job. In "mary's" defence, most accountants I've worked with are more computer literate than many Developers I've worked with, some how coding and good computer use don't tend to go hand in hand.
Whenever a person is inducted into an organisation they will receive training anyway, even with the upgrade from 2000 to XP people needed to be trained and introducing people who cant think for themselves to Vista will have as much of a problem as if you moved them to Linux. People with half a brain (problem solving ability) are less of a problem and can figure out something like Ubuntu of Fedora Core in 1/2 and hour.
Incompetent people will not learn no matter how much training you put them through, all you can do is tell them where to click, you'll have to do it again after the next coffee break anyway no matter what operating system they are using so they may as well use the better OS.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
And tech idiots never look at the business cases...
Where I work we actually like downturns in the economy. We do IT consulting and while our clients do spend significantly less overall during a downturn a sufficient percentage of the budget shifts from hardware with no margin to services, (high margin), keeping the old important stuff running that we actually come out better for it!
"Do More With Less." means you can do it WITHOUT having support in-house to fiddle with your hacked together crap, which is FAR more expensive than paying the licence for small shops. How could you seriously mod this as insightful.