Making software is easy. You just collect the market data, generate a
high-level technical specification, build the product, and test it. All
marketing needs to do is put together some screenshots and sales can just
kick back and wait for the orders to start flooding in. Right?
Unfortunately for software vendors, it doesn't quite work that way. It takes
a long time - years in fact - to get software right, and the problem starts
from the very beginning - understanding the market. Part of the issue is that
the market does not understand itself. Go into any large company, and ask
them to detail a business process such as order entry, and you will get a
variety of differing responses.
The Process of Process
Management will describe the process as they think it is. Unfortunate... (more)
Enterprise software is under attack. Traditional infrastructure players like
BEA are seeing their core products replaced with free open source projects,
while traditional application vendors like Oracle/Siebel are being displaced
by SaaS. But is this a slugfest with only one winner? Will SaaS and open
source ultimately turn against each other for dominance of the software
business model ... (more)
I don't see a future for enterprise software infrastructure components.
Applications, though, are a different matter. The key difference between a
piece of infrastructure software and an application is that an open source
developer is a user of infrastructure and knows exactly what is needed, but
developers typically have no clue about business application requirements.
It's no secret that... (more)