I’ve quite quiet this week on the blog front. Sometimes that happens, dear readers. In the meantime, here is an interesting collection of quotes from other people on Enterprise Software.
Tomorrow’s Utopia
From Ross Mayfield note’s on Ray Lane’s State of the Enterprise speech:
Wiki, blog and podcast — the world is becoming about user generated content. It used to be information blasted at us, but guess what, all the information is here and you can interrogate the web, understand your social network. Why is MySpace that huge? People want to be a part of their social network, get their information that way and be valued for what they contribute. We will get new web-driven capabilities such as personal activity recording, physical world alive, electronic room designs and contextual awareness.
And from Dan Farber’s notes on the same:
In talking to a hundred Fortune 200 CIOs, Lane said that the software vendors don’t understand their businesses, want to sell the past, have no skin in the game and want them to pay maintenance fees to fix their software. “The entire software industry made one huge mistake in the late 1990s–it focused on buyers and not users,” Lane said.
Simple Muck
From Dare Obasanjo on everyone’s favorite topic, REST vs. SOAP:
[Dion Hinchcliffe] mentioned that he gets thousands of readers who are enterprise developers working for government agencies and businesses who see all the success that Web companies are having with simple technologies like RSS and RESTful web services while they have difficulty implementing SOAs in their enterprises for a smaller audience than these web sites. The lesson here is that all this complexity being pushed by so-called enterprise architects, software vendors and big 5 consulting companies is bullshit. If you are building distributed applications for your business, you really need to ask yourself what is so complex about the problems that you have to solve that makes it require more complex solutions than those that are working on a global scale on the World Wide Web today.
The Muck
From “Why I Still Love Oracle”:
Of course, the greatest risk in such circumstances is that customers will abandon the platform, but the truth is that database and application platforms don’t go away easily. Once customers come to depend on them for essential business functions — from accounting to marketing to inventory management — letting go becomes, well, difficult. That’s why customers demand heightened levels of support to stay with acquiring firms. Oracle has already proven that it’s capable of such a feat. Take Rdb, for example. This database was produced and managed by Digital Equipment Corp. for years, before Oracle bought it in 1994. Today, there’s still a support page at oracle.com and whitepapers for how to use Rdb with Oracle’s latest platform, 10g. Is it really any wonder that nearly all of Oracle’s customers renew their support contracts, including those inherited from acquired companies? (See page 23 of the latest 10-Q filing for more.)
Letting the Muck Dry
From Brandon:
Everyone wants immediate ROI for everything they buy. Who doesn’t want immediate gratification? I know I do, why shouldn’t large corporations want it. Truth be told is Enterprise Software pays off over decades. Take online bill pay. How long did it take to deliver on that promise? I would guess at least 10 years, maybe more. Of course, now large banks enjoy significant savings and consumers have been freed from the misery of check writing. It took awhile but it paid off.
End Notes
From a completely different domain, way back in 1943:
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
…
We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
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