For the past few years, we've talked about the "consumerization of IT," which was a polite way of saying, "Enterprise software stinks and should be made easier to use."
I've rarely seen as concise an explanation of why enterprise software is so bad as this one by Michael Nygard on his Wide Awake Developers blog.
Nygard points to a troubling intermediation between the users of software and developers of software, offering four ways in which this is expressed:
- "They serve their corporate overlords, not their users." This is one of the problems I have with IBM software: it seems to be written for the CIO, not the people that actually work at the CIO's company. In other words, powerful central administration with end-user ease of use is forgotten. (Not that IBM is alone in this--it's just that I'm having flashbacks right now to when I was forced to use Lotus Notes.)
- "They only do gray-suited, stolidly conservative things." Simply put, enterprises too often get stuck in the mind-set that they employ a bunch of drones whose work consists of filling out expense reports. The real work is the creative interaction between employees, but it's the consumer Internet that has been tackling this problem, even though enterprise IT could most benefit from it.
- "They have captive audiences." Nygard doesn't offer much explanation here, but I take it to mean that enterprise software developers can get away with foisting lame software on the world because the competitive bar is so low. "Our piece-of-junk ERP system is not quite as junky as our competition's" seems to be the winning argument.
- "They lack 'give-a-xxxxness' ". Nygard identifies this as the most important characteristic: the love a developer has for her software and its application, and thus the time she spends making it sing. This hearkens back to the previous principles, however, in that it captures the apathy enterprise software developers may have for their products because they're writing for CIOs and cash, not users and public plaudits.
If this rings a bell, then what are we to do about it? I don't know. So long as the first order of business is security and administration, often taken to wacky extremes, rather than creativity and user-friendliness, it's unclear how anything will change.
Perhaps this is a generational shift. Just as President Obama chafed at having his BlackBerry pulled, perhaps we're entering an age where a new crop of CIOs will arise that demand that ease of use be as important as security, for example. It's not a matter of scrapping the "enterprise" in "enterprise software," but rather of shifting the argument to insist on considering enterprises as agglomerations of people, not droids.
And perhaps, just perhaps, open source can make things better by blurring the lines between developer and vendor, and developer and user. We can hope.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Reading The Wall Street Journal on Friday, I was struck by an article detailing the changing fortunes of luxury goods manufacturers like Burberry and Emanuel Ungaro, and how much they mirror those of enterprise software vendors. Recent discounting by luxury goods companies has led once-loyal customers to question the price tags they once resolutely paid:
...[M]any fashion-industry veterans believe last fall's steep discounting of European designer goods by 70% or more did lasting damage to the perception of luxury. People now feel like they were ripped off by high prices all along--and they are vowing never to pay full price again. If you can buy a Michael Kors wool dress for $230 on sale,...you may wonder if the original $2,400 price wasn't a bit high to begin with.
Bingo. This is precisely the doubt rising amongst CIOs as they review licensing and maintenance costs with their software vendors. One recent example comes from TechWeb Global CIO writer Bob Evans, who wrote an open letter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison criticizing Oracle's fat pricing in lean times:
The issue that needs your fresh thinking and attention in today's brutal economic climate is the one-size-fits-all, nonnegotiable 22 percent annual maintenance fee Oracle charges your customers.
As you well know, those customers are desperately trying to cut costs and conserve cash, and are exploring every possible option for doing so. You can help those customers very directly while also advancing Oracle's cause in a variety of ways by being willing to modify your stance on that single-tier, unmodifiable policy....
Mr. Ellison, it's easy to see why you like the current system, where someone pays, for example, $4,000,000 for a software license and then pays you $880,000 every year for "maintenance." And maybe CIOs will continue to find that's a fair exchange of value. But maybe they won't....
To which I'd add, "Let's hope they don't." The current enterprise software pricing model is unconscionable. It shifts all the risk of an IT purchase to the buyer, who must buy on faith with limited recourse if the software doesn't perform as marketed, or even if the intended project dies, leaving the customer with software licenses that it can't use.
Open source and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) turn this bloated, outdated model on its head, insisting on a pay-for-value and pay-as-you-go model that benefits customers through lower costs, lower risk, and higher performance. It's therefore no wonder that Red Hat, the leading open-source vendor, continues to grow in a shrinking economy, as Forbes recently pointed out.
In my own open-source business (Alfresco), I've seen incumbent, proprietary competitors drop prices by as much 100 percent...and still lose. Why? Because even at a 100 percent discount on the license, Oracle, IBM, etc. charge maintenance pricing that is far out-of-line with the value their software actually delivers.
Luxury goods companies are recognizing the need to lower the cost of their wares, because they simply aren't worth the inflated price tags they've long commanded. Enterprise software is the same. That BMC maintenance contract you're considering renewing? It's not worth it. Go with Hyperic or Zenoss or another open-source provider instead, and save money while maintaining or boosting productivity.
Yes, you can.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
Next week I'm headed to Argentina to work and to ski. (Mark Shuttleworth will be joining me so I'll post pictures once I have them.) In preparation, yesterday morning (6:30 AM, to be precise) I headed over to the Sport Loft to have my Tecnica Dragon boots custom fitted.
Sport Loft does an amazing job with boots. Having gone there, I'll never go anywhere else. It wasn't cheap, but it was worth it. As Jeremy, who spent two hours fitting my boots, and I talked, he said something that resonated with me on a number of different levels, not the least of which being software:
In the US, everything is mass produced. We understand volume businesses. But in Europe, they really focus on a customized product.
He was talking about how most people never get their boots custom-fitted in the US, but that it's quite common in Europe. As open-source software adoption in Europe compared to the US shows, ski boots and software may have a lot in common.
Open source adoption in the US is quite strong, but it is Europe that leads the way, as Forrester recently noted. Europe recognized the economic benefits of open source well before the US did, and Europeans (or those of recent European origin) are responsible for many of the industry's most important open-source projects.
... Read moreFor some time now, many of the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley have been focused beyond enterprise software. The New York Times carries a feature today on Silicon Valley's efforts in solar power, coinciding with a steady drumbeat of news on Silicon Valley and Green Energy.
Add to this the dominance of consumer-facing players like Google and the push of Software-as-a-Service vendors like Salesforce.com and you have what appears to be a complete rout of the traditional enterprise software market. Selling upfront license fees for millions and dinging enterprises on an annual basis is sooooo 20th Century.
All of which begs for the rise of the IT department again.
... Read moreI had two conversations today that set me to pondering the future of open source. One was during a panel I moderated on "cloud-based computing" at the Webguild Web 2.0 Conference. The second was over lunch with an old friend.
First, what happens to the open-source development community if the world moves to cloud-based computing? Open source has been a server or PC-based phenomenon. Why did Linus Torvalds develop for an x86 architecture? Because that's what he had. He didn't have a massive server farm to work with. Neither do you.
Think about it. What software could you or I write in a world where there are only a few "computers" (five, according to Yahoo), computers to which you and I don't have access? I suppose developers will increasingly be able to write code for others' "clouds," but will this be the same?
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will definitely be bidding for US wireless spectrum in January.
If it wins a wireless license, Google would be in a position to become a provider of mobile phone and Internet services, to partner with others interested in doing so or to lease the spectrum to them. The company has said it wants to make mobile networks more open, so that consumers can use any Internet service and application and move their handsets between carriers without onerous restrictions.
Let's hope it wins. I've been critical of Google in the past, but one thing is clear: Google is an innovative company that builds useful things. Google continues to push the envelope on what we can do with our computers and with our phones. Look around and count how many truly innovative companies there are among the big software and telco companies. Not many.
In fact, Google may be the first of the next generation of software companies.
... Read moreThe Open Source CEO series is still going strong, and will continue through next week. In fact, I expect to have some high-profile surprises to add to the roster next week....
However, I wanted to put readers on the alert that soon after I'll be kick-starting the "Open Source @" series. I'm fond of giving grief to traditional enterprise software companies for failing to "get" open source. Well, starting next week I'll be giving an open forum to some of the world's largest software companies to share their open source activities with the world.
Reading through the entries submitted so far, I think it's safe to say that many will be surprised by just how pervasive open source has become, even within companies that don't style themselves as "open source companies." I may have to eat some crow.
I'm looking forward to hearing from Oracle, BMC, Novell, and others. Stay tuned.
Fake Steve takes a swipe at Microsoft's bloatware problem, and strikes true:
For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered "thought leaders," and who definitely have Microsoft's attention. They've been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They've done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, "Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy." They don't want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go "unlock value" and get customers to use all those features that they've already told Microsoft they don't want....
Microsoft seems to have lost sight of the fact that its rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager. Windows 3.0 was lean and mean and, relatively speaking, open. OS/2 with PM was big, bloated, expensive, and all about locking you in to IBM. IBM was the big monolith trying to protect its market share and suck everything into its maw. Microsoft was the disrupter, using a little toy weapon to attack a fortress.
Amen.
It's not simply Microsoft's problem, of course, but pretty much all of enterprise software's. Enterprise software has worked so hard to justify itself that it has lost sight of the normal customer's needs.
... Read moreYesterday was the second day of Alfresco's quarterly management meeting (and no, I don't like this one because there are no football matches during the summer, though I am going with Luis to see The Drowsy Chaperone tonight. During the meeting, we spent awhile talking through changes in enterprise software; or, rather, changes that should happen in enterprise software.
What's the biggest problem in enterprise software today? I mean, besides how expensive, complex, and clunky it is?
It doesn't work the way the world works.
What do I mean? I mean that despite the fact that, as John Donne might write, "no corporation is an island, entire unto itself," most enterprise software treats corporations (and their denizens) exactly as islands. Little pools of creativity who share within the walls of their own corporation, if at all (and generally not at all).
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