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."

Comments

Re:Noo, really?!?!?

[JamesP]

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.

Too bad I have a really nice salary and I know how much a developer costs.

  Software development is darn expensive too.
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.

I'm not complaining much about it being expensive, rather, on it being CRAP.

Yes, smaller number of copies changes the situation, but if in one hand it makes things harder from the financial standpoint, everythng else should be better.

And I've worked with very specialized systems (as a developer) and I was astounded by the flakyness and overall lack of quality of something that is so fundamental (SCADA).