October 30, 2007 5:20 AM PDT
Why enterprise applications stink
Nick Carr points to an insightful blog post by Khoi Vinh, a developer at The New York Times, in which Vinh effectively argues for open-source enterprise applications, perhaps without knowing it:
This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn't benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it's only natural that the result is often very strange.
Unless you make it open source, and then suddenly the possibility (though not the absolute actuality) of quality returns, because you get that rigor back. Yes, really.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
