Red Hat CEO Says Software Vendor Model Is Broken

alphadogg writes "The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems. 'The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.' Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about $1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that 'easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year,' he said."

Comments

Broken how?

[odies]

How is it broken? There are different ways for companies to go by.

You can already buy commercial products that are made for general usage, like Microsoft Office. They can be feature rich products too, since they're used by many and different people and companies need different features. Since the products are made for large amount of customers, price for a single user or company is relatively low.

If you require something that the commercial products don't offer, you can either hire a development house to build it for you or do it in-house. That way you get exactly what you need, but the price is higher since it's made specially for you. If there is a mismatch between what you want and what commercial products offer, you go this route.

Now, the CEO of Red Hat basically says that model is broken, but offers no alternative. He says open source magically fixes it my offering services and support. But what is there to offer if the companies still need to go the second route if such product doesn't exist? And if it exists, what is broken with the commercial model? They do also offer support.

Re:Broken how?

[DarkOx]

But out side of ERP systems which almost always get customized, getting a commercial vendor to modify the product to suit your specific needs is nearly impossible, unless your are an F500. That is where Open Source can be a win.

Open source is great when you want some special behavior in the sales quoting tool that only a tiny fractions of others anywhere would want but you otherwise want the base set of features the mass market wants. If you select an open source tool you can make those modifications. If you select a product with a fairly mature code base its probably not even that costly in terms of developer time to keep your patch set applying cleaning against version latest.

 

Re:Broken how?

[mysidia]

Open source is great when you want some special behavior in the sales quoting tool that only a tiny fractions of others anywhere would want but you otherwise want the base set of features the mass market wants.

Quoting is something a lot of businesses will want some fine-tuned control over. The software should be designed to bend to their business needs, not the other way around.

This strongly suggests that 'sales quoting' tools should have templating and scripting features, for advanced users, so each business can roll out the software without code changes, but with some scripts installed that suit their special needs.

Re:Broken how?

[Cylix]

Actually, vendors that have their shit together will listen to their customers.

This morning I'm trying to push a feature we would like to see (rather need) for some hot backup operations. While there are several documented work arounds that will mostly work it does not offer a consistent solution. While we certainly do not drive the features from this particular vendor they will at least listen. At heart most software shops are driven by a need to solve a problem. Now, unless you have money pouring out your ear holes it pays to see how many people really want this feature. Thus, the guy who is more or less the expert in our given area is going to go beat some drums and see if he can find a few others who are in our same boat.

Thus if there is a collective need (which I believe there is) then we can see more drive on this particular goal. Open source works pretty much the same way and the more popular the problem then the more likelihood of seeing it corrected. Anyone who does not listen to their customers either doesn't need to or will simply suffer from it. I suspect that statement has some gray to it because with enough marketing and salesliars it should be possible to get cash from anything.

Re:Broken how?

[Bert64]

But this is exactly the point, software does not bend to their business needs and countless businesses have had to adjust the way they work to cater to whatever software they happen to be running...

Re:Broken how?

[Anonymous Coward]

The model is broken. The economics of business are fundamentally broken.

50% of small businesses fail in the first year. 95% of small businesses fail in 5. Among other things, this means than close to 99.99% of all labor made nothing of lasting value, and so is worthless to everybody but the guy who got paid to do worthless stuff.

And we base our economy on this.

Re:Broken how?

[Stooshie]

What you have described is, effectively, evolution. Although each individual may make nothing of lasting value, the end result are some extremely useful things with enormous lasting value.

Re:Broken how?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you have described is, effectively, evolution. Although each individual may make nothing of lasting value, the end result are some extremely useful things with enormous lasting value.

Evolution is fine. Except when you consider that the vast majority of money does not flow through the hands of evolutionarily notable entrepreneurs, and that monetary policy is typically meant to retain a currency's value over time. We are effectively slaves to retirees, who have nothing of value to trade with our labor today. We are triply screwed. There is close to a 100% chance that a dollar from 1960 represents the fruits of useless labor, and so is worthless today. And an hour of work today is significantly more productive than in 1960. And this generation is smaller than the previous one.

No Shit

[cyphercell]

Seriously, who the fuck didn't know?

Re:No Shit

[marcosdumay]

99% of the world, that don't have to clean the mess created my differing customer expectation and sotware compaies offerings.

WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 63]

every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want... usually spending much time in the office observing users in real world scenarios, and flat out asking them what would make their job easier.

perhaps the vendor the CEO was talking about was the one he knows best.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

So then you have never worked with Oracle, SAP, or Symantec, so which vendors are you talking about?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 63]

all of the above + Sun + Intuit + Microsoft... all have spent time one on one with companies i've worked for AT THEIR OWN REQUEST.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

Real world example, and why I don't do software development:

A customer was using a text field in a database for a "date". They wanted to have that field usable to send out notices (dog tag renewals) on a date. I was wondering why the database field wasn't set to the "Date" type proceeded to convert the field to that type. Proceeded to setup a query and template to generate the notices automatically, rather than manually doing it as had been.

I then proceeded to show the primary user that made the request the changes, how to enter the dates and thought I had done a awesome job making the software better (it was better). The user used the system for a week or so, but couldn't for the life of her figure out why it wasn't working.

So I make a house call out to the facility and watch her as she enters a new date 10/20 into the database. Well the software beeps and tells her the date is invalid (duh), and she complains that she has to type in the year.

Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.

No, I'm not kidding.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 64]

why didn't you add some input cleansing that could have automatically defaulted the year and given the user exactly what they wanted?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope their sales engineers were wearing name badges. It would have been unnerving for them to have you stand next to them yelling "YOU ARE NOTHING!" in their ears.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[phek]

i think his point is that the vendors sell what makes work easier for Company A, B, and C to Company D even though only the features that make work for Company B are helpful to Company D. So now Company D has to buy all those other features which they'll never use and Company A and C will have to buy the features that help all the other companies when they have to renew their license.

Using the CEO's airline model, they were able to get say the catering industry to reduce costs by not providing something like resealable plastic containers and instead opting to use a cheaper single use container. In the software industry with the model the way it is, we can't make changes on a per client basis.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

This is a prime example of not listening to what the users want.

It is trival for the software to figure out what the current year is. With a small amount of effort done once on the part of the programmer to convert a day/month (or month/day) date into a full date, the user would have been happy, the software would have worked as they wanted it to and it would have been quicker and less error-prone for them to enter the data.

Instead the software vendor implemented what they thought the user wanted and more importantly didn't listen to the user completely, they implemented half of what the end user wanted and this resulted in more work having to undo the work that had been done to revert the system back to the "old 'n busted" way it was before.

Customers ask for things they want, but the developer needs to be willing to listen to them,

I had a similar thing happen recently, however this was for a database I was developing for my own purposes.

It has a field type of time, but it's really strict - you must enter a time as hh:mm[:ss] AM|PM anything else beeps at you as being invalid (duh)

With some coding effort and a liberal amount of google searching, I was able to have this field exhibit a lot more intelligence and be infinitely more user-friendly. I now have it so that you can enter just about anything that can be interpreted as a time and it'll sort it out. I get the computer, not the user, to do the hard work.

Now, I can enter 800 and it will be 08:00 am (I have a range of hours defined that are AM or PM - 700 is 7pm for instance - this is completely arbitrary and works perfectly for the intended use)

I can enter 1525 and it will enter 3:25 PM, I can enter 4 and it will enter 4PM, I can enter 9 and it will enter 9am. I can enter 12:34 and it will also take it...

It's now a lot quicker for me to quickly enter a few numbers rather than enter numbers separated by colons and an explicit am or pm. It's also a lot less error prone as there's less thought involved, less keystrokes and no need to use a shift+key stroke combination.

In your example, a few more minutes of coding effort to detect a supposedly invalid date (I know what 10/20 is, the user knows what 10/20 is, you know what it is, so tell the computer what it is) and everyone would have been happy.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mmaniaci]

Until she starts putting "Yesterday" in the box...

Re:WHAT vendors?

[maxwell demon]

And it wasn't possible to extend the software to accept dates in the short format, and transform it to the longer format before sending it to the data base?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[frank_adrian314159]

Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.

So why couldn't you put a hack in the UI that checked if the date was in MM/DD format and default to the current year (or next, if you were storing the expiration)? Some odd notion of "the UI data format must exactly match the data format" purity? It seems like a fairly reasonable user request. And, it would have been three extra characters, as they'd had to have entered the separator character, as well. Force yourself to type three extra spaces at the end of each line of code for a year and tell me how much you like it. It seems like you had a "stupid user meme" in your head that you were unwilling to get rid of. It doesn't speak well of either your development or personal interaction skills.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Surt]

Exactly what I wondered. The gp post seems like a great candidate for the daily.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[icebraining]

The user is right: why should she spend extra effort? Don't we have computers to make those efforts for us?

More specifically: couldn't you have included a filter that would recognize a MM/DD date and turn it into a correct one before inserting it in the database? Plenty of DB engines nowadays support REGEX in triggers.

I think you're blaming the wrong person.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 64]

because string comparison and integer math to determine yesterday's date are too difficult for you?

why else have a text field? let them type in "2 weeks ago" and make it work... IT'S TRIVIAL.

i'd make the interface with a calendar popup and navigation buttons to jump days and weeks and months and years.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Surt]

Yeah, the place I work at spends a lot of time and money understanding what our customers need, and we have a focus on software customization to boot so if it isn't exactly what they need (and each customer has slightly differing needs) they can get to what they want with relative ease.

Of course, we've also had over 50 implementations of large scale enterprise software and 0 failures, so we don't have our fair cut of the 500 billion worth of failure money.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

that all works until someone needs 4 to mean AM sometimes and PM all the other time.

Defaulting the current year makes sense, until you have cards for December being entered in January (11 months difference), a common yearly adventure.

Did you miss the part that she would rather manually sort through the records than type two characters?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

My kingdom for a modpoint, this AC deserves a +5 funny.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. Grandparent is an idiot for not doing this, and an even bigger idiot for not noticing all the improperly formatted dates in the database and doing this before showing the client.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[timeOday]

No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 64]

there is an alliance of individuals that moderate anyone that attempts to contradict me as insightful... it couldn't be more painfully obvious here.

the vendor represented by "Archangel Michael" created more work for the user, then when the user asked for a trivial feature to return the workload back to what it was before, the vendor gave up and trashed all their work, and the "slashdot community" deems that act AS THE HIGHEST LEVEL OF INSIGHTFULNESS.

you're all idiots.

slashdot = stagnated.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MagikSlinger]

Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.

Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).

Re:WHAT vendors?

[cyphercell]

I love how retarded your description is.

800 = 8:00am
700 = 7:00pm

????

Seriously, stfu.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

So in that case it's a process of refinement - implement what they say they want and seek feedback on the implementation rather than implementing what they say they want (even though their spec was incomplete) and saying "There, that's it. Take it or leave it"

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real people in that position don't need to shove that in people's face. I'll stop here before I harm your little ego too much.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[frosty_tsm]

that all works until someone needs 4 to mean AM sometimes and PM all the other time.

Defaulting the current year makes sense, until you have cards for December being entered in January (11 months difference), a common yearly adventure.

Did you miss the part that she would rather manually sort through the records than type two characters?

Your heart was in the right place, but failed when you fixed a pain the customer didn't mind by creating one they did.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

In what dream world will they keep paying for all these one off solutions?

Users want cheap, good and fast. Providing all three is impossible.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

The user initially loved the idea of the proper date field - a small tweak to it and they would have been completely happy.

Defaulting to the year makes sense, as long as you have a well defined rule for it that the user can understand - if you commonly enter records for Jan of the following year in December, make it so that a month of 01 when entered late in the year is for the following year - similar to how most vendors worked around the y2k bug by having a rule that anything after (for example) 40 was 19nn and anything before 40 was 20nn

Interact with the end user, refine your model of what they want and you will end up producing a better product and have happier end users.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[CasperIV]

That's a UI failure. If the user wants to enter month/day, let them enter it and logic it in behind the scenes. I have users ask for things like this all the time... so I give it to them. It's not something that's going to be a big deal, and it makes their lives easier entering it. Either that or mask it properly with a defaulted year.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[somersault]

Almost nobody who is paid to develop software is thinking "you're kidding". They're thinking "why not just append the year before submitting to the database?". It really wasn't the customer who was being silly and inflexible here.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 66]

what does an anonymous coward know about real people?

i didn't shove my opinions on the world like the red hat CEO did... i simply pointed out the flaws and missing data in his opinions.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

You and the other people are missing the point.

I could have really customized the code and done a whole bunch of sanity checks on the user input, all to save two digits being entered. All of which would increase complexity and other types of problems. Defaulting to current year in programming logic is great, until it isn't. Then you're in a race to fix the exceptions, which adds to bloat and slowness.

And it is no wonder that there is so much database fubar out there with people coding defaults, having to fill in exceptions rather than making things explicit in the first place.

I could have had pull down menus, and/or clickable graphical calendars too. And people wonder why software is bloated with features only a few people want. Which is exactly what the article itself is saying.

Lastly, this was from DbaseIII days, not modern SQL and Web based forms generated and sanitized by Perl Scripts, which would make such a feature quick and dirty point click easy (for the user).

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

You're missing the point. (besides making assumptions that is is a current problem)

This was back in DbaseIII days (DOS,40x25 screens, monochrome CRTs). The problem is customers wanting something, but not willing to do what it might take to get there. OFTEN times choosing the harder way (manually sorting records) rather than doing things "differently".

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

Why do you lie?
What are you compensating for?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[cyphercell]

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Extensive-Date-Parsing.aspx

STFU.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Did you miss the part where I said:

(I have a range of hours defined that are AM or PM - 700 is 7pm for instance - this is completely arbitrary and works perfectly for the intended use)

If I'm booking an onsite technician for instance, they are not going to be onsite at 7am, I'm not sending anyone out that early in the morning, yet it's completely possible they'll be doing work after hours starting at 6 or 7.
In the same light, I'm not sending anyone out to start work at 8pm, but would quite happily have someone going out at 8am.

In this case, what is "retarded" about having a rule that determines that 8 .. 11 is AM and 12, 1 ... 7 is PM?

In the extremely rare situation that this rule doesn't apply, enter the time as "7" for instance and it gets corrected to 07:00 AM, change the A to a P and you're done. Either that, or enter the time as "7p" and it's put in as 7:00 PM

Or would you rather have to enter every single time value as hh:mm:ss AM|PM explicitly?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

Why do you need so many sock puppets?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 68]

i'm not talking about sales reps... i'm talking about groups of engineers who simply observe real world use, and attempt to make it easier. they aren't there to give you what you want, they are there to determine what you want or what would make completing the tasks the software is used for more easily.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[cyphercell]

don't forget to verify that the system is using the proper fucking time in the first place.

I got what you were saying, dipshit (key user - I love that this implies that OTHER fucking people may have benefited from the work destroyed) didn't want to enter two characters, so scrapped what was probably a 300% increase in efficiency.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

The customer wanted to be able to sort by dates, I did that. The pain of doing things differently wasn't about anything other than not wanting to change when change is what was requested.

I would rather type to extra numbers than have to manually sort though records because data in a field wasn't indexable (DBaseIII) the way the customer wanted. But that is me, I can see the benefit of not doing things the hard way, and changing how I do things to get things done better, more efficiently.

Of course it is easy to solve that problem today, we have better tools for dealing with it. But the TYPE of problem still exists. Customers saying they want something, and realizing what they asked for isn't really what they want.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MagikSlinger]

Never seen them (vendor engineers). Seriously. Where did you work where they would talk to you?

There are medium to smallish companies we buy software from, and they have sent their engineers to observe & talk to us. But none of the big boys have ever sent any engineer to us.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

So, you'd rather an end user when forced by a database program that will only accept explicitly formed times to enter hh:mm AM or hh:mm PM (and not any close variant of this, such as hh:mm am) rather than entering something a lot quicker and less prone to error, such as 7p or 1245.

In the first case, entering 7:00 PM this takes 9 keystrokes, including the Shift key. Reduce that to 2.

In the second case, entering 12:45 PM this also takes 9 keystrokes and is reduced to 4.

If you're doing this hundreds of times a day, the extra time very quickly adds up, plus you need to think a lot harder about ensuring you enter exactly what the database wants as a timestamp, remembering capitalisation etc ...

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 41]

i don't lie. i don't compensate. I BRING NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.

my name is michael kristopeit. i live at 4513 brittany ct. eau claire, wi 54701.

what is your full given name? what is an address where you can be reached? why do you cower?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit999]

I am of course totally making this up. I clearly have nothing better to do with my life.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

You made the mistake of assuming it was a date. It was really a month and day to represent the anniversary (every year) of when the renewal goes out. Two integers and some validation.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Geoffrey.landis]

every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want....

I have to say that at no time has Microsoft ever tried to determine what I want.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 55]

MichaelKristopeit999 is an impostor attempting to steal my identity.

to the individual responsible:

present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will kill you.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[AVee]

I actually worked at a software company in that league (a Top 10 software vendor). Those companies are big, weird and certainly not to be regarded as a single entity. Whether or not they are going to spend time on your needs really depends on loads of factors, the biggest ones being politics between the big shots in both companies and the amount of money you bring in. If your CTO is very good at the politics you may get above average attention. If the amounts you get invoiced are big enough to be noticed in the quarterly results you will get above average attention.

But if your just 'Joe Sixpacks Beer Store' you are generally screwed. But in that case you probably also wouldn't want to pay for the costs of proper attention, if you would be willing to pay for all the hours spend to accomodate your needs you would be served (and go bankrupt). Building software isn't cheap, an you are going to pay the full price for anything that is build just for you one way or another.

And the of course there are the governmental projects, but those are in a league of their own. Those are the projects where you send the people you wouldn't dare sending to any of your bigger customers. Government officials spending tax dollars will always pay, regardless of how badly things get screwed up. (The amount you get to spend seems to be a dick size issue, and it's all just tax money anyway...).

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 40]

i've seen them at 3 different bay area companies i worked for.

perhaps it was the close proximity to the engineers why they chose use... perhaps they overlooked your company when the sales reps reported that you distrust them.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[timeOday]

Exactly - realistically, any complex project is a process of refinement. But when people fail to recognize that and instead budget for a "hole in 1," they are setting expectations almost guaranteed to result in the project being considered a "failure," which is the normal thing to do.

People say, "why are software projects still so expensive and time-consuming" - I say, compared to what? Some imaginary utopia where software projects are much easier than they actually are?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahahahahahah

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit999]

MichaelKristopeit 55 is an impostor attempting to steal my identity. to the individual responsible: I am a loony and I like to make threats that will soon get the cops called on me.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 33]

how many seat licenses does your company pay for? where are you located?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

Bingo, we have a winner.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 37]

a real person =/= a digital representation of a coward.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 38]

"MichaelKristopeit999" is attempting to defame and discredit me to the end of stealing my identity.

to the pathetic, cowardly individual responsible:

present yourself to me; admit what you've done, then i will kill you.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

I dismiss any accounts which people add numbers after as such. It is an attempt to escape their past actions on slashdot. A cowardly act even on the internet.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[cyphercell]

I want to know what 13 turns into? 1:30AM? 1PM? 1:30PM?

And is there a standards body willing to assume stewardship over your Time/Date markup language?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MagikSlinger]

perhaps they overlooked your company when the sales reps reported that you distrust them.

LOL! Good one. :-)

Proximity is entirely the reason you saw them.

Although for the small to mid sized vendors I mentioned, they did fly in and stay for a few weeks.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[blair1q]

You fucked up.

Always allow defaults for un-entered fields.

And yes, that field you used had sub-fields that should have defaulted. In fact, the day and month should have defaulted as well.

You're like those dopes who put telephone-number entry fields in forms and then lazily put directions on formatting them into the webpage instead of just detecting the dashes and parentheses or lack of them yourself.

Go do it again.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

13 turns into 13:00 which is 1pm.
130 turns into 1:30 PM (as explained before 7 is defined as PM)

How is this so difficult to understand?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

No, it was a limitation of the Database (DBase III), on 40x25 Monochrome CRTs attached to DOS (XT/286). Just because it can be done easier today doesn't mean that was always the case.

And which completely misses the point, that customers want what they want, even if it is not possible (budget, complexity, timelines, features).

In this case, I provided exactly what the customer asked, the at the time, budget and complexity that was all manageable. The customer didn't want to change how they did things, but wanted the system to change how it did things, which wasn't possible with the tools I was using at the time.

PreGUI relational databases in DOS were fun, but this kind of thing drove me nuts. It wouldn't today, because SQL and sanitizing input is much easier.

Customers change their minds, and say "I didn't ask for that" all the time. Ask any waiter.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Late Adopter]

Ideally there should be a library function, as in this case that does the intelligent processing. At the very least you can run it as a first pass, and if it doesn't understand that, use custom code for whatever the common use cases at the business are.

Intelligent date/time parsing is hard, and not available everywhere perfectly yet. I would kill to have a function in python that parsed as well as Google Calendar.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[dannys42]

I think this is situation actually exemplifies what the original post was talking about. You as the developer heard "date" and interpreted that as particular a "date-base formated date field." Whereas the user really wanted something a bit different.

Closing /that/ gap is the challenge.

FWIW OmniFocus does support various notations like today/tomorrow/1d/etc to make things easier to enter.

I'm not saying any of that is easy fool-proof. But I think the original article is trying to highlight exactly this sort of gap between developer and user.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

He who trusts sales reps is a moron. Software, hardware or new cars, sales people alway lie.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 38]

so are you a hypocrite or a liar?

or don't you recognize "11" as a number?

is "4" a number? you're an idiot.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Look, I'll concede that I'm not a coder - I can cut and paste and make small changes and that's about it.
The code I have in FileMaker Pro to do what I want is well and truly WTF-worthy, however it saves the users of this database a large number of keystrokes. This improves their accuracy, it improves the speed at which data can be entered and most importantly of all, it is what the end users wanted (arrived at through a process of refinement) so I have happy end users who have a system they are happy to work with as it works the way they want it to. I have the computer doing the hard work, which is the way it should be.

For those who are interested, the code I have is (post it to thedailywtf if you wish, it works beautifully for me)

This took maybe an hour to research up and tweak to my needs and it's going to save far more than that in saved end-user time with the users of this database.

/* 9:00 AM to 8:59 PM can be entered as single numbers with assumed AM and PM. */ /* 9 = 9:00 AM, 1030 = 10:30 AM *, 1030p = 10:30 PM, etc. */ /* from http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/213923/ */

Let(
Self = GetAsNumber( Start Time );
Let(
inter =
GetAsNumber(
Case(
Length( Self ) = 1;
Self & "00";
Case(
Length( Self ) = 2;
Self & "00";
Case( Length( Self ) = 3; Self; Case( Length( Self ) = 4; Self ) )
)
)
);
Let(
suffix =
Case(
Right( Start Time; 2 ) = "am";
" am";
Case(
Right( Start Time; 2 ) = "pm";
" pm";
Case(
Right( Start Time; 1 ) = "a";
" am";
Case( Right( Start Time; 1 ) = "p"; " pm" )
)
)
);
Case(
inter > 0 and inter < 900;
Left( inter; 1 ) & ":" & Right( inter; 2 ) &
If( not IsEmpty( suffix ); suffix; " pm" );
Case(
inter 900 and inter < 1000;
Left( inter; 1 ) & ":" & Right( inter; 2 ) &
If( not IsEmpty( suffix ); suffix; " am" );
Case(
inter 1000 and inter < 1200;
Left( inter; 2 ) & ":" & Right( inter; 2 ) &
If( not IsEmpty( suffix ); suffix; " am" );
Case(
inter 1200 and inter < 1260;
Left( inter; 2 ) & ":" & Right( inter; 2 ) &
If( not IsEmpty( suffix ); suffix; " pm" );
Case(
inter 1300 and inter < 2160;
Left( (GetAsNumber( inter ) - 1200 ); 1 ) & ":" & Right( inter; 2 ) &

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

Maybe because I rather not have nutcases like you know where I live. You really should consider that, never know when a bigger nutcase might come after you.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

The numbers after your name you keep changing, due to your karma getting to low. You know what I meant. At least this is my only slashdot account.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Michael Kristopeit]

why should i believe you? i walked past the dealership today and asked the salesman what time it was, even though i had a clock on the phone in my pocket... i was testing him. he gave me the correct time.

why do you chose to not claim responsibility for your comments with your given name? why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're an idiot.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

Says the guy who makes more accounts to get out of any responsibility for his comments.

You sir are a hypocrite.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

At the very least, you need an English lesson and some anti-psychotics.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

The fact that you admit you are using Filemaker is enough proof. Not a flame, just it sucks big ones.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[turbidostato]

"every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want..."

Maybe. But they take even greater effort in determining what *they* want. Sometimes that's related to users's desires, sometimes (i.e.: lock-in, closed-source distribution license) not.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Hell yeah, doesn't it ever!

Developing in it is a pain in the arse for sure, but for a cross-platform database with a half-decent layout engine for creating decent looking forms, it's hard to beat.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Junta]

How dare the customer want their life to work as straightforward as it did before the change. If entering 10/20 always meant 10/20/, the fact they lost this for the sake of 'cleaner' and using more of the DB capability is a valid complaint.

The missing piece there is why the user is interacting directly with the DB, rather than some form that takes the input, sanitizes, and does nice things like append current year if year is omitted. This way, you get to use the capabilities of the DB, provide more resiliancy in the face of mistyped or malicious input, and the user doesn't have to do more work than they are used to.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[xda]

Cisco has lots of sales engineers. When your small company is blowing your budget on their gear just think how happy I was when they took me out for sushi every other week. You meet a lot of sales engineers when you work in telecom, many times they practically live on site.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[formfeed]

And it is frustrating from the user's point of view as well.

Just imagine getting a cab to the airport. Once you're in, the driver tells you that the road to the train depot is much faster and nicer.
Sure. you didn't get what you wanted, you got something much better instead, and if you learn about train schedule you might be thankful later.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[kangsterizer]

of course you're not. i'm getting this kind of stories every week at work. It pisses me off major time.
usually I just implement the features i think are the best and the way *i* think are the most efficient, and the way i would like them if i was the user (of course being a programmer and all might not always be spot on but still)
then usually many people like, and eventually some stupid customer (really) wants to change a useful feature into a bad one, or add useless things to it.
i warn that it's going to be bad, etc ec but since i'm not the boss eventually i usually have to implement it
it never fails, a few weeks later there's complains due to that new feature or modification, and a lot more of complains than the single request we had in the beginning.

but no.. mr boss never understand that the customer isnt always right and that all this is just psychological issues, not software issues.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[kangsterizer]

Sorry but most of the time, the customer has no fucking idea what they want.
They want something, but they just don't know what. they're going to ask changes for the hell of it and need some time to then decide it was a bad idea and request the change to be reverted.

now that doesn't mean developers always know what the customer wants, far from it. but he has all the tools and knowledge to figure it out, because he knows how everything works. the customer, is clueless basically. (in most cases at least)

that's because usually it's not about typing a date in a field, also.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[kangsterizer]

exactly.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, just ignore him. its pointless.

do you realize he is doing this to make people waste modpoints? please don't feed the trolls.

- go, have a walk, see you gf. let him spend his night creating more 100+ accounts.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

If you are a small shop or need something that is easy to use I will grant you that. The performance is horrid though. At least the latest version talks SQL, and I think supports using a real DB for the backend even.

We have an old Filemaker 6 or 7 legacy thing here that is kept around for legal reasons. Can't wait to end it.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

If you don't egg them on they might get jobs, and I want to remove any competition.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 40]

ur mum's face'll be somewhat pleased that it was ascribable to a pseudonym.

you're an idiot

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

You and the other people are missing the point.

Not really, most of the post's were responding to a typical (and not totally unjustified) response of a programmer -

Real world example, and why I don't do software development:

there a funny quote by Henry ford that says "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." it was reflected in his attitude about the model T. - "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". Henry finally learned to listen to his customers by the time the model A came out in lots of colors, mostly cause they were starting to shop somewhere else.
engineering types generally suck at business.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mysidia]

Government officials spending tax dollars will always pay, regardless of how badly things get screwed up.

They always pay, but they might not pay you. They may redirect their future business to a new project

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mysidia]

Why didn't you just alter the application to interpolate the year, rather than inserting the form directly into the database without validating it?

Sounds like bad design of the form app.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Archangel Michael]

13 is also 00:13
13 is also 1:30
13 is also 13:00

which one of those is right when I type 13?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mysidia]

then when the user asked for a trivial feature to return the workload back to what it was before, the vendor gave up and trashed all their work

Obviously... the vendor couldn't take even the smallest criticism, and apparently decided they wanted to make a point out of the whole thing, rather than address things in a reasonable manner.

This is not a technology problem, this is a customer service problem. The parent did have one thing right, however, he obviously should not be in software development working for a customer.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mysidia]

No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.

You have to listen to what they say, and intuit what they want, then formulate it, and ask them if that is right.

If you can't do that much, software development for a customer is probably the wrong field for you. Though you might manage to do code monkey / slave to the designer work, who works to someone else's precisely defined spec.

Since that doesn't require intuit'ing that much, and if your code is wrong, it will just get kicked back to you by the reviewer (aka slavedriver)

Re:WHAT vendors?

[mysidia]

Ideological arguments have no place in developing software for your boss.

If they ask you for feature X, you can inform them of the issues and give them a choice. The choice to avoid "feature bloat" is not your choice, if all the features are demanded or wanted by the customer.

Nothing really excuses failing to validate input, whether 'abbreviations' of some sort are allowed or not.

Checking for a 'year value not provided' and appending a default in the user interface code is so trivial and relevant to the problem, that it seems absurd to claim that it is not the best solution here.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[flimflammer]

I have a hard time seeing how someone could reasonably think any of the first two would be possible. It looks to me like you're just arguing for the sake of arguing now.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Exactly! if you ask me the time, and I say it's "two" you immediately know I don't mean it's 00:02 (as in two past midnight) and you're also generally not asking me this at 02:00 (or 2:00 AM) as if I'm talking to you at that hour, I'm not going to be making any sense, so you know straight away that it's 14:00 or 2:00 PM.

Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?

I tell my software that a job is starting at 8 and finishing at 930. It knows what I mean.

How on earth could anyone assume that 13 is 1:30? or 00:13?

Would these be a reasonable assumption if you asked me the time and I said "twelve" - could anyone really think that I really mean 01:20 or 00:12? No, seriously, could they?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[PhunkySchtuff]

13 is also 00:13
13 is also 1:30
13 is also 13:00

which one of those is right when I type 13?

This is crazy talk. I'm just glad that you aren't writing any parsing software for me.

13 is "thirteen hundred hours" which can also be entered as 1300, 13:00, 1p, 1:00 p, 100p, 1:30 PM, 1:30 etc...

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are bat shit crazy.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 20]

ur mum's face are bat shit crazy

Re:WHAT vendors?

[daath93]

I love you.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[jimicus]

Don't even need anything that complicated - at least one DBE I can think of of will let you put TODAY or TODAY-N into a date field and automagically do the calculations for you.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[jimicus]

sorry, meant DBMS. Too early in the morning....

Re:WHAT vendors?

[DrSkwid]

your improvements suck

10/20 should be a perfectly valid data entry. Your interface to the database should deal with it accordingly.

The reason you don't do software dev is your attitude to your customers.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tehcyder]

No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.

Do you write "Utter Arsehole" on your business cards, or do you let people work it out for themselves when they talk to you for the first time?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Hognoxious]

Why do you need so many sock puppets?

He's a centipede?

Re:WHAT vendors?

[timeOday]

It's the yes-men who encourage unrealistic expectations right up until the big disappointment of the blown deadline and schedule who really cause everybody grief.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Hognoxious]

let them type in "2 weeks ago"

Because when they type in "2 weaks ago", "or "two weeks ago", or "too weeks ago" or "to week's agoe" it won't work and it'll still be your fault.

Only retards try to use free format text for anything other than display.

i'd make the interface with a calendar popup and navigation buttons to jump days and weeks and months and years.

And that would probably take more clicks or keypresses and be slower than typing in the full date. And that will be your fault too.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[AltairDusk]

All I can say on Symantec about this is maybe they talk to IT but they clearly don't talk to the end users who end up dealing with it on their machines.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Hognoxious]

This is a prime example of not listening to what the users want.

It sounds more like a prime example of listening to what the users say they want.

To take your example of times, how would you implement that accross a corporateion, with hundreds of uses who all use the same digits to mean different times, or use different digits to mean the same times, or for whom the meanings aren't constant (say, due to shift patterns)?

I'm not saying it's technically impossible - I know it isn't, but it's not going to be cheap to develop and it'll likely be a pain in the butt to maintain.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[AltairDusk]

I've found more often than not the salespeople barely know anything about the product they are selling. It makes me sad that as a casual automotive enthusiast I can walk into the local dealership for a few different brands and easily know more about the cars being sold than the person whose job it is to sell them. I had to educate one on the difference between AWD and 4x4 (the classic, selectable kind) a few weeks ago.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 22]

so whoever engineered this broken website is responsible for your ignorance?

it's not free format text... IT'S JUST TEXT. you'd rather have a voice input?

many DBMS already accept "TODAY" or "TODAY-N" or "NOW()"

you're an idiot.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Hognoxious]

A customer was using a text field in a database for a "date"

That's a WTF right there, but it's only the tip of a WTFberg.

Assumption: it needs to be stored in the form that was entered. Hence the problems with sorting.

Assumption: it needs to be displayed in the format that's stored.

Assumption: it always needs to be displayed the same way. Epic fail if you have to deal with two countries where one is the USA and the other is anywhere else.

Assumption: you won't need to do calculations based on it, or if you do, you'll have divine intervention.

All database systems support a true date format; some support several. If you genuinely need to fuck around with it by entering ante diem Kalends or typing in a bird's bra size and it converts it to her birthday by a fuzzy query on the HR master or similar malarkey, then in the name of all that's holy stick all that shit in the application or UI layer.

P.S. All the asshats who replied "it's just a matter of...[1]" or "I'd invent an automatic mind reading module..." clearly have no real world experience, and therefore can fucketty fuck the fucking fuck off.

[1] exception: the suggestion of assuming the current year if only day and month are entered actually would make sense in 99% of cases.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[poopdeville]

Writing a parser is trivially easy, WHEN THE GRAMMAR TO BE PARSED IS DEFINED. If it isn't defined, you have a lot of work ahead of you. A poor designer will end up with an incomplete ad hoc grammar, which will potentially behave in unexpected ways. These are exactly the kinds of questions a "parser writer" needs to be asking.

And how can thirteen hundred hours be entered as 1:30 PM? If this is a functional requirement, you need to state it as such. This is yet another special case.

Asking these questions is expensive. Having people answer them makes you a pariah ("What, are you stupid?" indeed) Libraries are cheaper.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

The user here is perfectly correct.

The field was never meant to be a date, but a day of the year when the renewal was due. So entering a year does make little sense.

You simply did not get the correct specs and made assumptions that were nor appropriate. May be the original designer did actually the right decision. But then you probably saw the date in that field and figured that is what was needed.

And you should have been able to store a date but make the app so that it only does present the renewal day.

Heck, you could even infer this day from teh creation date of the record (if you want to make it immutable). No data entry required at all.

I know I have 20:20 hindsight here and I don't blame you for the mistake (it happends all the time in software dev and when it happens severe enough the projects fail - see the original article). But I'd like you to expect it in the future as a normal part of software dev and react with a solution instead of blaming the user.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[ThePhilips]

Building software isn't cheap

I gather you are not engineer?

Building software is cheap, but when you have in place dozens departments and managerial layers, then yes, it got to be expensive or why we, big guys, are doing it at all??

I once made a budget program for a smallish company, producing all the forms they needed for their partners and tax office. Starting from scratch I needed 2 full days of work. This is not a f***ing rocket science, people. Get real.

You saying that software isn't cheap is precisely the sign of the brokeness of the system. Because as the RH guy says, you just keep pumping useless features to make the software look expensive. By implementing features in a usual corporate manner they always remain half finished, what has the positive effect of creating more space for more features in the future.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

many DBMS already accept "TODAY" or "TODAY-N" or "NOW()"

And is the "today" that the calculation is based on the day it was stored or the day it was retrieved?

Just as well you're making it all up - it's an accident waiting to happen and nobody sane would use it.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[Hognoxious]

Assuming DBE means database engine, since when did users interact directly with it? And anyway, "TODAY-N" is too complicated, she wants to type "yesterday".

Re:WHAT vendors?

[jimicus]

Wouldn't be too difficult to recognise the text "YESTERDAY" and "TOMORROW" and implement them as today(+|-)1.

The point is, there is no need to re-invent the date calculation wheel. Which is a remarkably easy wheel to mess up.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[LWATCDR]

Yes, no, and sometimes. As the number of users goes up the cost to produce a single change to the software increases. At my company we have a few tens of thousands of customers and I can tell you that things are not always as simple as you are making them out to be.
One problem is with COTS Windows hardware and software. You get some of the dumbest interactions on the face of the earth.
We had a pretty common touch pad driver that was causing a c++ exception on our porgram. Well not in our program exactly in the MFC framework from Microsoft.
Then you have anit-virus software that can cause performance issues and IO problems.
Then you have malware causing a problem with your app.
And so on and so forth.
Then you have the law of "That never crossed my mind". We had a rash of customers that where overwriting their data with and old data.
For the life of us we couldn't figure out how this was happening without them giving the command and ignoring the warning message!
This was back in the DOS days and while our program did have pull down menus they also had hot keys for every command.
The command to copy to the floppy was CTRL F CTRL T for copy to.
The command to copy from the floppy wast CTRL F CTRL F for From Floppy.
What was happening is users thought that they had hit the F and the T key at the same time.
So when holding down the F the auto repeat in DOS hit a second F for them!
As your customer base goes up a problem that is likely to effect only one out of a thousand users becomes a disaster that you hear about many times a day.
Even with our small customer base every change to the software must be checked and rechecked to cause as few problems as possible.
That is why it takes so long to get new features in and why it can be pretty expensive.
It really all depends on the situation.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[LWATCDR]

I can see her point as well. If you are entering hundreds of records a day that is a pain.
What would have been the best solution IMHO would be to parse the field and if the date was in the format MM/DD then add the current year to field when the user hits enter.

Good UI is more than pretty pictures. It is also about saving time.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[LWATCDR]

Why would that be a problem?
In a program I work on we put in all sorts of parsing on the pages field of the print dialog.
you can enter.
All
10-end
all even
all odd
1,2,3 50-100
20 to 50
and so one.

Folks take pride in your work and do it well. Impress and make each program a work of art.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit108]

what am i making up? if you are updating a column variable, you're updating the value FOR THAT VARIABLE... if you were updating the "stored_date" you'd be updating the stored date, if you updated the "retrieved_date" you'd be updating that value.

you're completely ignorant as i've implemented similar systems AT MANY DIFFERENT USERS REQUESTS.

relative time entry is both less prone to error and more efficient.

you're an idiot. nobody sane would hire you, coward.

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you're completely pathetic.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tomhudson]

If you don't egg them on they might get jobs, and I want to remove any competition.

Nice! And it's not even Tuesday. Please keep up the good work.

-- Barbie

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tomhudson]

the "at" command does it.

tomorrow at 3pm, next week at 5am, monday at noon, teatime - it understands them all.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tomhudson]

04/10

Is that April 10th, or October 4th.

Ditto for 02/03/04

February 3rd, 2004?
March 2nd, 2004?
March 4th, 2002?

Why do you think dBASE had "SET DATE TO AMERICAN" "SET DATE TO BRITISH" "SET DATE TO JAPAN" "SET DATE TO ITALIAN" "SET DATE TO MDY" "SET DATE TO DMY" "SET DATE TO YMD" "SET DATE TO GERMAN"

There was even "SET DATE TO ANSI" - but it didn't do what you think it does - it still gives 2-digit years, not YYYYMMDD. ... unless you also ran "SET CENTURY ON".

And nobody liked it ... "That's not how we do dates!"

And let's not forget the date separator. "SET SEPARATOR TO" was for currency, not dates. For that, you'd use "SET MARK TO"

But don't knock it - if was a great system, did the job, inspired a lot of clones and workalikes (my favorite was Clipper).and there are still systems running that same old code. And you can still buy it.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tomhudson]

They're thinking "why not just append the year before submitting to the database?

That would make it sort really badly - you want to prepend the year. "YYYYMMDD" sorts easily. "MMDDYYYY" doesn't sort so well ...

Remember, this is the date as a series of characters - a very sane way to store dates in the decade running up to Y2K. Heck, it still works.

-- Barbie

Re:WHAT vendors?

[MichaelKristopeit 22]

Hognoxious thinks you're a "retard"... from their post above:

Only retards try to use free format text for anything other than display.

text entry for high volume data entry is so ubiquitous and DEMANDED by users that i'm convinced only Hognoxious is a retard.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[somersault]

Yep that's how I store all my dates. In fact I just have users enter the date in this format, though they can use a graphical calendar pop-up if they prefer.

Re:WHAT vendors?

[tomhudson]

No y238k problem, no problem with dates before the epoch (1970), sorts nicely, easy to validate ... what's not to like, right?

-- Barbie

Actively used features

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary suggests that money could be saved by not developing the half of all features which are will not used. How can you tell which features will be used before you develop them?

Re:Actively used features

[snowraver1]

Easy, just make a menu item for them and then every time it's clicked, send usage data. That way you can have the worst of both worlds: A convoluted menu system and lack of functionality.

Re:Actively used features

[leuk_he]

It is not that hard The other model is to develop the application yourself instead of buying it. but the implication is that you become a software develop instead of doing the business you are actually good at. If your software does something better than the competitor then you might be a good developer.

Blah, blah, blah...

[Anonymous Coward]

...buy some Red Hat products.

Fragmented market?

[Subm]

Steve Jobs already solved this "mess for both users and developers, Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"

The solution is obvious: integrate all sales under Apple!

Re:Fragmented market?

[h4rr4r]

He solved nothing, he just stole the idea of repositories. Stealing good ideas is good, claiming them as your own is shifty.

Cloud will kill the model

[Mephistophocles]

Whitehurst touches on the emergence of cloud computing in the enterprise as well, and this is integral to an intelligent discussion of the imminent death of the traditional licensing system of enterprise software. From TFA:

""People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation. Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.

That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing. Happily, it likely means fantastic opportunities for open-source to take back a large share of the market. I've spent the last year migrating my medium-sized enterprise to the cloud AND a near-100% opensource infrastructure. In my particular sector (healthcare) that's becoming a trend - it's not a coincidence that the move within the medium to medium-large enterprise to the cloud often goes hand-in-hand with a serious investigation of open-source software within the mission-critical, production infrastructure.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Anonymous Coward]

I am intrigued by your experience and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...

But seriously, if you have a chance can you reply with a list of what specific cloud resources and opensource infrastructure you've selected and migrated upon? Thanks from a new healthcare CIO playing catchup.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[maxwell demon]

That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing.

They will likely be replaced with a "per transaction" style of licensing. I'm not sure this is an improvement.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Cloud Computing will enforce the model. Cloud computers and storage media exist somewhere on the internet, owned by someone else. Rather than buy software and a site license, you now have a Cloud landlord. There are Cloud System Administrators, electricians, and others working for said landlord. Before, you just didn't own the software; you now don't own the computers & data as well.

Do you like having a landlord & paying rent on your house? Why would you want one affecting your business.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Surt]

This seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of enterprise licensing costs. Costs are calculated per cpu or per seat because that's a convenient proxy for the size of the system, not because of any actual deployment expenses associated with the number of cpus or seats. If you think your licensing price is going to magically head downward because of cloud computing, you are in for a nasty shock. Instead prices will head up because the cloud providers now have more lock-in. In any case, the licensing cost goes to development and profit. Which of development and profit do you think the enterprise software provider wants to give up when they move to a cloud model?

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a big corporation charge the hell out of them mentality will once again win the day.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead prices will head up because the cloud providers now have more lock-in.

Not if I load-balance my work to multiple providers and dynamically send it to the highest bidder.

Lock-in will only happen if you allow yourself to be locked in by being stupid, or if one provider dominates the entire cloud market (unlikely here - it's a commodity and it's pretty much geographically neutral).

All in one: yes, software being turned into a commodity is quite bad for Microsoft's business model and quite good for producers of open-source software.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Anonymous Coward]

Licensing is only part of the story:

What about the obligation using 'innovative' technologies that are immensely inferior to the 'old' (no-longer supported) technologies?

What about the brain-dead obligation to break all your infrastructure every 5 years to cope with the pace of innovation (aimed at selling more)?

Planned obsolescense is the plague of this market.

And the Linux (FREE) alternative turns to be much better when properly used:

http://gwan.ch/

Yes, Linux can be made 5 MILLION TIMES faster than IIS 7.0 + C# -on the same hardware.

Re:Cloud will kill the model

[Surt]

Instead prices will head up because the cloud providers now have more lock-in.

Not if I load-balance my work to multiple providers and dynamically send it to the highest bidder.

Lock-in will only happen if you allow yourself to be locked in by being stupid, or if one provider dominates the entire cloud market (unlikely here - it's a commodity and it's pretty much geographically neutral).

All in one: yes, software being turned into a commodity is quite bad for Microsoft's business model and quite good for producers of open-source software.

That's again a pretty bad misunderstanding of how enterprise software works. So when you get unhappy with your current provider you'll just 'send it' to the, I presume you meant lowest, bidder? Along with your data for the last couple of years, and a massive, hugely expensive, conversion project every time you do so? You think those providers are going to do the work to settle on a common backing data design, just to enable you to force them to compete? The problem, again, is that you've focused on hardware provisioning as the cost in enterprise software, and that's completely wrong. Hardware typically accounts for less than 10% of the cost. So yes, you can potentially halve that 10%, and maybe save yourself 5% if you get a bunch of different clouds to compete to RUN your software. But the other 90% doesn't budge, or even gets worse.

Waste is what drives the economy

[m94mni]

Just like war, commuting and other essentially completely worthless phenomena, waste of programmer time makes money exchange hands, and therefore increases GNP.

In this case: who would want to be the first to go out on a limb publically and say "I want to decrease the IT sector by 50%"?

Don't blame me, I didn't design that stupid measure.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 64]

uh... exchanging money does not necessarily increase GNP.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[seifried]

uh... exchanging money does not necessarily increase GNP.

Actually it does:

A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), and net national income (NNI).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measures_of_national_income_and_output

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to decrease the IT sector by 50%. I want to see all 100% put to good use instead of wasted.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[m94mni]

Correct, but all my examples do.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[m94mni]

Me too, but sadly "good use" is not a factor in GDP calculations.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[jfengel]

Actually, you're the idiot here. GNP is a technical term, and you were pointed to the definition of it. It's a mechanism for estimating production and productivity.

It's not a perfect measure, for a number of reasons, including the one you pointed out. But that's the fault of the measure, and you were the one who brought it up.

If you mean productivity, say "productivity". Use the wrong technical term and people will generally ignore it, but when you call them an idiot for validly correcting you, it means you're the idiot in the conversation.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

You've created a service economy. Maybe call it Western Union?

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 66]

who means productivity? GNP = GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT.... it measures the total dollar value of all final goods and services produced...

m94mni claimed "money exchanges hands, and therefore increases GNP"... it CAN, if that money is put to use by the new holder of it to produce new goods or services, but the act of exchanging it does not NECESSARY increase GNP as the word "THEREFORE" implied.

if you're mean you're an idiot, YOU'RE RIGHT.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 80]

if the service had a price, perhaps... but i didn't mention any such thing.

you're an idiot.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[Billly Gates]

Well if the pickings were slimmer but filled the client's needs at only 50% of the cost then the rest of the money could go to other I.T. things. It is not wasted at all

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[butlerm]

Actually it does

Actually, it doesn't. You need to read Wikipedia on the calculation of GDP more carefully. GDP is the sum of final consumption expenditure, gross capital formation, and net exports. A business only has real resources to invest in new equipment because somebody is forgoing immediate consumption. If those resources (or claims to resources) are exchanged for worthless equipment, gross capital formation is zero.

So we have a reduction in final consumption with no gross capital formation, which means the GDP goes down. Alternatively, if you use the income approach, you must deduct capital consumption from the salaries and profits paid to everyone, and get the same result.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[butlerm]

it measures the total dollar value of all final goods and services produced...

minus capital consumption, which you are forgetting.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 20]

considering my point is the LACK OF GOODS OR SERVICES... i didn't forget anything... i chose not to rub salt in the wound of ignorance.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[marcosdumay]

No, if an industry buys some useless equipment, their capital grows exactly the same amount it would grow if the capital was usefull. So, that aquisition is counted on the GDP, as would any usefull activity.

I really don't understand how do you expect the government to measure the usefullness of everything you buy while calculating the GDP.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[butlerm]

No it doesn't. It is called depreciation and/or capital loss. If the equipment is worthless the real value of capital added is zero. Otherwise you are just engaging in an accounting fiction.

Sometimes it takes a little while for the accountants to catch on. But a typical example would be if the equipment is sold for scrap, or at a major loss. Then a capital loss entry gets entered representing the difference between the cost basis and the sale/scrap value. That is a reduction in the book value of the company, a capital loss, and a reduction in GDP.

That is why the Wikipedia article refers to the "capital consumption" adjustment in the first place. Depreciation counts as capital consumption. If the equipment is only worth a fraction of what was paid for it, properly speaking its book value should be marked down. Normally equipment is depreciated over its useful life, if it has a "useful" life, of course.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[tomhudson]

If money exchanged hands, then the GNP went up.

Same as a car accident increases the GNP. So does a hurricane. So did 9/11 (20 billion injected into the US economy at the bottom of a recession from foreign insurers).

Nothing even needs to be given in return. An example is car insurance. You pay for it, but you don't have an accident, so you got nothing in return, no new goods or services (your own words). And yet the insurer had income and a profit - GNP went up.

Even the act of literally exchanging money cause the GNP to increase, since the exchanger charges you a fee for providing you with this service.

Say you GAVE someone $100.000 - free and clear. No expectation of anything in return. No product, no service. A simple gift of money exchanging hands. That would STILL cause the GNP to go up (death and taxes - in this case gift taxes).

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 53]

If money exchanged hands, then the GNP went up.

FALSE.

i just gave my wife $1... then i told her to give it back... she did.

no product was created.

you're an idiot.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[tomhudson]

Oh look - Michael Kristopeit the Idiot, so stupid that he actually thinks his maunderings prove anything.

If you had given her $25,000, the GDP would have increased, because she would have had to pay taxes on it. In your example, it's just part of the undeclared underground economy.

Also, since you DIDN'T "give" it to her - since you never gave up control of it (you told her to give it back), you're an even bigger idiot.

-- Barbie

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit 18]

the original moron, who presented the idea you are currently attempting to defend in a way that only a woman who calls herself "TOM" could defend was not in GIVING money... it was in MONEY EXCHANGING HANDS.

money exchanging hands DOES NOT NECESSARILY INCREASE GDP... such as when it is passed back and forth for fun, and the original owner retains possession.

you're an idiot. go tell someone else your name is tom, tranny.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[tomhudson]

That's Kristopeit for you, having to keep making new accounts to keep posting because he gets down-modded to oblivion (for obvious reasons :-)

No talent, no class, no manners, no brains ... must be Michael Kristopeit!

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit119]

a woman calling herself tom... must be a transvestite.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

a shithead calling himself michael kristopeit... must be a shithead.
you're completely pathetic.

Re:Waste is what drives the economy

[MichaelKristopeit115]

i do not cower. why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

you are NOTHING

F#ck yeah!

[guybrush3pwood]

F#ck yeah, and I want my share!

Re:F#ck yeah!

[c0lo]

Share of what? I think there are plenty of chances that you already have your share in the wasted effort and, if you are employed, a small share of the wasted money (it is called wages).

In other words, don't equate the effort to the results: you can still work very hard (in terms of effort intensity) to produce waste (in terms of achieved results) - chances are, though, you'll have a better share (in absolute terms, even if not as a percentage) if your efforts result in something that's useful.

Re:F#ck yeah!

[guybrush3pwood]

My attempt at being funny has been unsuccessful, evidently.... ;) I *do* take a share, by the way, so all's good. Keep the wast going.

Re:F#ck yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep the wast going.

And at least have fun

Re:F#ck yeah!

[c0lo]

F#ck yeah, and I'm on /. to grow my share!

FTFY.

Maybe.

[khasim]

But from his original statement:

The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.

That's because as it because possible to do more in X hours ... more is demanded by management.

As more space becomes available, more data is stored. Older data is not discarded.

Re:Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. Today's data formats are much less efficient than the past ones. Compare MS Excel files to TAB-delimited spreadsheets. How does HTTP data transfer compare to FTP?

XML is the worst in this respect. XML data is stored in character format even when all the data is numeric. A binary file can use much less space on disk.

Yeah, and then some

[swordgeek]

So we had a major upgrade project. Our old authentication software on old hardware was going to be replaced with new software, new hardware, and a new architecture made possible by the features in the new software.

Months of planning, rearchitecting, tripping over bugs ("oh, it's fixed in the next major version"), and testing, and it turns out that the software from vendor A does not work acceptably on the hardware from...vendor A.

Throw the plan out, and start from scratch on new hardware. Halfway through, vendor A (who by this time has been bought by Vendor B) changes their licensing/maintenance model, such that it will cost us an extra million and a quarter dollars (!!!) PER YEAR (!!!!!) to use their crappy software. Add an extra $50k to license their OS if we don't buy hardware from them.

(Yes, you can probably guess who A and B are :-)

Lucky for us, a new vendor rose from the ashes of an exploding corporate division, and is writing competent code. They also seem to be capable of supporting their own product. Not everyone is as "lucky" as us though, to make something work the third time.

To be fair, the $1.4 trillion in software costs will have little or nothing to do with the 40% of failed projects. Nobody of a reasonable size pays for software until it goes into production.

Too much common sense... head... 'sploding..

[eepok]

The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.'

Yes! There are so many features that end up being hindrances or that fall short of actual needs that it makes an investment not worth while. For example, here's what I want out of just my cell phone:

My Cell Phone (Rumor2) needs to:
Make and receive phone calls (Grade: A)
Keep a phone book (Grade: A)
Send text messages using a mini keyboard (Grade: A)
Play MP3s (Grade: D-)
--3.5mm headphone jack (Grade: F)
--Drag/Drop micro usb computer interface (Grade: C)
--Easy playlist, enqueue functions (Grade: F)
Serve as an impromptu, good-enough camera as needed and transfer photos to another cell and to a computer (Grade: B)
Take a micro-SD 8GB card (Grade: A)
Have the option for a low-graphic, low-power GUI. (Grade: C)
Be included with the $40/month 2-year contract that allows for limited cell-to-cell photo transfer, unlimited nights/weekends, unlimited texting.

That's what I need... this is what else my phone tries to do:
Connect me to a Sprint-only pseudo-internet as well as the real internet
Sell me games for my phone
Sell me ringtones (while not allowing me to make my own)
Be GPS

And I know I'm not alone. It's not like I want a rotary phone attached to my hip, but I don't want to be SO WIRED all the time. Give me a tablet PC that runs as Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or some other low-graphic moddable UI) for $400, the phone that fulfills only the needs I list above, and a desktop PC and I'm set. That's it. Game over.

$X wasted == doesn't understand the copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, if software's priced as an exclusive, transferable asset where one person's possessing a copy excludes another from getting one, then of course it's broken. The price of software would ideally be adjusted to do three things:

  * security

  * drive the developers to add capabilities and fix bugs where it's needed

  * extract money from customers in a way that maximizes value

Support contracts seem like they would do a better job of all three than outright sales, so I'd expect RedHat to understand this, but saying that "$X is wasted" makes it sound like he's still thinking of software like an exclusive asset. With these three goals, money cannot be wasted. Rather, software can be less secure than it should, developer time can be wasted, and customers can get a bad value because the vendor's revenue isn't extracted from them optimally. None of these three things is close enough to "waste" to even make a good analogy.

What He Is Missing

[0xG]

...is that we don't want to "rent" the software.
(which is how Red Hat makes its money: on maintenance)

The endless cycle of maintenance upgrades for the sake of compatibility with other software that has been upgraded for the sake of compatibility with...
That is what needs to be fixed for enterprise customers, but it goes directly against the business interests of the software vendors. We'll never see that fixed...

Red Hat is Wrong

[daviskw]

If all Software and IT needs were being funneled into new projects and new features and new ideas then the Red Hat guy might be write. This is not the case however. Most Software development done in the world is based on specific needs generated by specific customers on existing IT systems. It is a painfully slow, deliberate process that sometimes produces astonishingly public failures. Most of the time what is produced is quite successes that for the most part do what the customer wanted done.

A couple of years ago my organization switched from Silicon Graphics workstations running an ancient C++ compiler to Red Hat Linux on Dell workstations. It took us about six months to migrate the code from one platform to another. We didn't develop new features that nobody wanted. We didn't create waste where none existed. What we did is exactly what the customer paid us to do.

Vendor driven software that is created with an unknown user in mind is usually pretty scary in that you are always going to get features you didn't want and features that you do want but they don't work well. Guess what, that's what you get for making a product that is designed for the general propulation. Cars are the same way. I want a Toyota Truck, and I want a really cool sound system. They don't sell them that way. I get the adequate sound system that Toyota provides, it kind of does what I want, but if I want better I am going to have to by better, and even then it make not work 100% in my truck, and it will most certainly do things I didn't want it to do.

This isn't, for the most part, waste. Waste is what you get when you contract a software system to build, it takes five years, costs 100 million, thirty developers, and then when you are two weeks from shipping sales tells you that they can't sell your stuff. However, for every one of those types of projects there are literally dozens that didn't get cancelled and were shipped to sometimes eager customers.

Customers are stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I'm sorry to say it but listening to what customers want more often then not is a recipe for disaster, what I think needs to happen are specialists who specialize in trying to assess people things need but don't know they yet want. The whole idea that people are good at self-analysis of what they need/want for their organization is the issue, some times you get customers who are but more often then not your customers are clueless.

Re:Customers are stupid...

[KingAlanI]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
When collaborating with the user goes wrong...

"only half of all features are used" = by design

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

[evil]As a guy who puts together some of the software packages you buy I can tell you that bundling of commonly and rarely used functionality often happens by design. And it doesn't just happen in the software industry: car manufacturers do it when they bundle their options too. The advantages of bundling for the buyer are: fewer choices (shorter lead time if you know what you want) and better budgeting (fewer trips "back to the well" for more money); the advantages for the seller are: cost containment (fewer combinations to test and support), tighter brand control (the "SE edition" instead of "features 12 and 15") and higher prices (less ability to buy smaller increments of functionality). The risk we take as a vendor is always that someone will provide a better package of benefits for a better price, but it continually surprises me closely IT consumers in any particular market will track to the pack - even paying an order of magnitude more for similar features available from an innovative competitor - the "better mousetrap" is usually only a secondary risk.

Before someone hops on here and says "the cloud will break this model", please remember that another widely-used on-demand service called "cable TV" has already figured out the bundling concept and applied it viciously. (Ever wish you could just buy ESPN and SciFi?) Once various SaaS, PaaS and IaaS industries stabilize, I'd bet bundling of "features I never use" will be a common complaint here too - and you'll keep buying nonetheless. [/evil]

Meanwhile.. in the real world

[js3]

Companies developing software are still raking in billions of dollars. Maybe stop giving the shit away for free...

Re:Too much common sense... head... 'sploding..

[js3]

it's nice to list what you want, but others want something else too. That's just the way the world works. It's just QQ to me

Same talk from Red Hat Summit 2010

[dowdle]

Jim said the same stuff during his keynote at the recent Red Hat Summit 2010. If you want to see it, watch the video here: http://www.redhat.com/videos/summit2010/Jim_Whitehurst.html

Our business model is better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Our business model is better, says CEO of company using said business model. Followed by, "maker of widgets says widgets are great". This needs to be tagged "slashvertisement" or something along that line.

Business real culprit, no model will change that..

[johan_from_cape_town]

I happen to consult on packages software in the financial service industry - and while the technology is yucky, the sales drive/strategy model is broken the fundamental issue is ALWAYS business. Businesses should stop blaming everybody else for their problems. In the end of the day business is responsible for choosing their vendors and their implementation partners. They are free to set project constraints. They are free to do contracting in ways that better suit them. 1) Businesses should make sure procurement is done by people who know what they are doing. 2) Businesses should implement decent program and project management from the very beginning. So while I keep hearing that vendor X software is bad because the project failed - in me I know: Customer selected wrong vendor/technology, or customer selected wrong implementation partner, or customer did not manage the job from their side, or they had some political infighting (one of the sites I worked on had 18 data warehouses. and none of them could give a complete picture of organization. of course the reason for that is that they were essentially under control of different factions within the organization. ) Red Hat can say all they want about "Enterprise Software Sale Model", but I can guarantee that if the world was fundamentally different and all software was GPL open source --- the wastage would have been exactly the same. People would blow money on implementation cost. People would use the argument "but it is open source so you can modify it" so that each organization would end up maintaining its own individual branch (which would negate all the benefits of community development ). Business would keep on spending millions on getting consultants with science and engineer degrees to change fonts on screens. So while I do like open source, and I dislike enterprise license and "maintenance" fees the port of call would be to actually start managing your business efficiently. This is the reason I suspect "cloud computing" will be successful. Not because of technical reasons, but because it literally takes away a lot of the power AWAY from business and package it is as something else.

chief information officers holding all the risk

[jeko]

worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.

*begin ill-tempered, sleep-deprived rant*

I can certainly understand why some suited weasels would want to buy their way out of any personal responsibility, but seriously, ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHERE THE RISK BELONGS?! I thought that's why we paid them all that money, because they had the 'l33t business and organizational skills to handle the risk, like professional ball players. They're "superstar talent," remember?

God forbid a CIO actually have the get off their fat ass and, you know, TEST an implementation before it goes into production. Oh no, better to just let me get another 3 am panicked call because some jackass can't read...

*end vent*

The features that you never use

[joeflies]

were still used by somebody, and typically that's the biggest customer of that software. For instance, in the world of enterprise software, when you're a small upstart company, you first innovate to create the first release. They you add the project managers and the MBAs, and you need justification to add new features, and that's usually coming from demands from the biggest customers who threaten to kick you out and cancel the maintenance money.

So why are there features in the product that 50% of the customers dont use? The big customer's environment isn't a model of reality, and software developers aren't necessarily building the most pragmatic software or what the market as a whole needs, but what pays the bills.

A different model applies to the open source world, where software gets developed because the work's interesting to someone who often does it because they like working on it more than financial gain. Yet these features exist even without someone necessarily (or even most) people needing it.

It's odd that Red Hat is sticking their neck out and saying that software developers are making features that nobody needs. You don't have to look further than a Linux distribution to see a set of software repositories full of features that "most people don't need", but it's useful to somebody. There's no reason to discount its existence - it's there if you need it, but for the most part, there aren't many users that need to download every single package. You use what you need and don't need to bemoan that the rest exists.

It sounds like Red Hat's asking for everyone to take their Model T software package and be happy with what the manfacturer gives you, and pray that you get what you need because you're not getting any more.

Oh bullcookies.

[blair1q]

It costs nearly $0 to deliver a unit of software, no matter the feature set included.

So when someone buys a package to get one feature and is the only user of that feature, then he pays the full price of the software to get that feature.

And everyone else pays the full price to get the features they want and can safely ignore that feature, or try it out and start using it if they wish.

None of them, not one, came close to paying the full development cost for any feature they're using, but all, in aggregate, will pay for the development, marketing, G&A, yadda, yadda, yadda, just like people who buy cars or pizzas.

I'm in the middle of this actually...

[Charliemopps]

Basically my job revolves around operating and maintaining a database and front end that costs my employer no small amount of money. I came into my position between the last time the contract with this particular vendor was signed and now... when the renewal was due. Our account rep with this particular vendor sent their quote to my team to be forwarded on to our management, and as I read it I almost choked. They basically wanted to increase our rate by 1600%. Our IS department HATES software that we lease/rent/buy from 3rd parties. They are always of the opinion that they could do whatever the software we are using is doing, better, cheaper and faster. They are, of course, actually usually slower, twice the price and the application never works the way its intended. But when you take a quote to your managers that raises your rates 1600% they are inevitably going to head strait to the over paid script kiddies we consider our programming department to see what they can do.

After my initial shock I reviewed the quote and found that they were charging us for some of the most ridiculous things. $20 per gigabyte of storage. $300 per seat of logged on users as long as they don't exceed so many page requests per day. If they do exceed their allotted amount of request then they enter a higher billing rate. So our licenses have burstable rates? On top of these we get charged per table, per data point, even per API request. We get charged for backups, for custom fields, for upgrades for just about every action or even inaction we take with the software. The end result was a contract that was over a hundred pages long and took a team of lawyers several weeks to decode into human language.

So I thoroughly agree with the CEO of Redhat. I also hope I still have a job in the next couple of weeks.

the problem is with management, not vendors

[PJ6]

Top-down management tends to fail when attempting projects of such complexity for the same reason controlled (non-competitive) economies tend to collapse. The vendors are only culpable because they encourage it with a great lie.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Too much common sense... head... 'sploding..

[eepok]

Ok, you're correct by tautology. I want something as do other people. Bravo! But you're not really commenting in the context of the article. You call it "QQ", but the Red Hat CEO calls it wasting hundreds of billions of dollars shotgunning bad features at users that don't want them.

It's an insane idea, but even the auto manufacturing industry modulizes features better than the tech industry.

Base Car = 15,000
Automatic Transmission = 1200
Built-in GPS = 500 + any subscription fee
Bigger engine = 1000
Alloy Wheels = more
"racing" suspension = more
etc
etc

AND when adding options that affect fuel efficiency, they note it! With devices like cell phones it's simply "We'll give you everything, charge you for everything, and you'll like it".

That's not "QQ", sugar britches. That's hoping one industry's common sense approach to sales catches on in the market I use more than once every 10 years.

Re:"only half of all features are used" = by desig

[michael_cain]

...remember that another widely-used on-demand service called "cable TV" has already figured out the bundling concept and applied it viciously. (Ever wish you could just buy ESPN and SciFi?)

This is a subject I know something about. Cable TV pricing for ESPN is complex, because ESPN has multiple revenue streams. ESPN advertising revenues depend not only on the number of actual viewers, but on the number of potential viewers as well. The price sheets are tightly-held secrets, but a cable company with 16 million subs (subscribers) buying bundles that include ESPN pays much less per-sub to ESPN than a cable company with only a million subs buying such bundles. A la cart is even worse. A big operator like Comcast or DirecTV may pay $4 per month per sub for each sub buying the channel as part of the bundles. If it is only available as an a la cart service, the charge may be $12-16 per month, paid directly by the sub. When we looked at it several years ago, the break-even point was surprisingly low, around three-four channels, particularly if they were sports channels.

The sports channels, ESPN in particular, have insane costs to cover. ESPN paid $8.8B for Monday Night Football rights the last time the NFL negotiated their contracts. 3.5 hours/week, 17 weeks/yr, a small number of years, $8.8B. Takes a big a la cart charge to cover that.

Expensive and worthless software

[Anonymous Coward]

Big companies love to buy expensive software that doesn't do much. This isn't the problem of the people developing the enterprise software, it is the problem with the people buying it. There are plenty of smaller companies that make great enterprise software that is designed to fit the users needs. I work for a company that does this. But our big competitors get all the sales. We often have potential sales where the people who will use the software want to go with us, but the executives want to go with the big, expensive companies. Guess who wins.

If the people who have the purchasing power cared about the software fitting the users needs, the big enterprise players would do more of this. But they really don't care.

How else does Sharepoint exist? I have yet to see it do anything well. Finding and accessing files is easier over CIFS/SMB. Version control works better with Subversion (which isn't that good to start with). When I worked for a company that switched to Sharepoint, it made my job harder. Yet all the big companies are running it.

Re:Too much common sense... head... 'sploding..

[bws111]

That is how the auto companies list the prices on the sticker, but try to actually buy a car that has just the features you want (for example, bigger engine but no alloy wheels). Most of the time you will find the options are only sold in packages, pretty much like different 'editions' of software.

Samefag

[Anonymous Coward]

A textbook example of samefag

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/File:Samefag_Matrix.jpg

Creating software vs purchasing

[Billly Gates]

In the early 80s 2 groups existed. One was to only use prepackaged software and the other is to use your programmers to create your own solution. His rant backs the former group but unfortunately it is viewed as an expense commodity that does not add value to a ROI. The battle to use prepackaged software has won. Until investment is viewed as a profit center and not a cost center no business will bother to hire programmers to create software to do what it is they need to do rather than buy a prepackaged bloatware that may or may not work.

Re:Too much common sense... head... 'sploding..

[im_thatoneguy]

See but I want GPS. And if it costs the manufacturer $1.50 for the GPS chip then why do you care if I get GPS?

He's just noticed this?

[whitroth]

He's just noticing the emperor is naked? 15 years ago, in PC Magazine, there was a review of word processors, and they pointed out that 90% of the users only used 10% of the features, and the 10% who used the other 90% of those features only used them 10% of the time.

So, how much of all the features do *you* use with a word processor? Or any of the software you use regularly?

For one thing, it's a treadmill for the sole purpose of reselling you the same thing, over and over. I've a friend who *has* to upgrade Quicken every few years, even though he doesn't need any of the new "features", because they won't support (tax rate updates, online things) if he doesn't.

                  mark

No.

[S77IM]

Your analysis is wrong; it's a classic example of the Broken Window Fallacy.

  -- 77IM

Re:No.

[S77IM]

WHOOPS, while trying to be smart, I committed Broken Link Fallacy. Correct Link

Re:No.

[m94mni]

Well, actually, I'm not :-)

I'm not arguing that society benefits from waste, quite the opposite in fact.

I'm only arguing that current measures of wealth (GDP) actually count these things on the plus side. Commuting is known to increase GDP, as is the kind of war the US is engaged in, accidents and indeed broken windows.

I was arguing GDP is a broken measure of wealth, Some agree, but it's unclear if you do!

My Bad!

[S77IM]

Sorry! From the subject ("Waste is what drives the economy") and the assertion that removing waste would shrink the IT sector, it sounded like you were pro-broken windows. (Removing waste spending would allow the IT sector to move on to bigger and better things.)

I agree that the way we as a society think about things like "wealth" and "growth" is pretty screwed up. Hopefully a person will read this thread and learn more and make all our typing worthwhile. Now, I need to go back to implementing workarounds for bugs in IIS 7 ASP.NET, when I could be off writing features...

  -- 77IM

Re:My Bad!

[hitmark]

Basic problem is that we have yet to find a way to measure growth directly (its not like one have a physically inflating balloon with a tape measure around it), so instead we measure proxies. Inevitably however, especially if there is money to be made doing so, someone will find a way to game these proxies, so that they keep going up while the actual growth stays flat or even goes negative.

One such issue is how to measure public services. The classical way of doing so is counting the number of clients, or similar, that get serviced within a given time frame. Problem is that this says zero about the quality of the service given. As such the service provided may be down right useless, but as so many clients gets serviced in a day the office is considered efficient.

Or how politicians talk about numbers of people at work, while the real measure to care about would the number of work hours that gets performed. Sadly, one can make it appear that a lot get done by having a lot of people do part time work. Doing so would make it appear as if there is very little unemployment, while the actual work done is no more then what it would have been with perhaps 50% unemployment.

This is the kind of numbers game that the Enron leadership ended up in court over.