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

Re:WHAT vendors?

[h4rr4r]

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

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.

 

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: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?

[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.