Two people (Dan and Thomas) I like a lot have been hitting on a subject lately and it’s centered around the user experience and how darn picky the end user I guess is. I think it goes far beyond that to a simple matter of choices, openness and the fu….

I should have explained myself better: What I meant is that during the Dotcom years IT spend was more influenced by people with progressive ideas and a tendency to support leading-edge solutions. Simply because they had to. Back then I worked with people who dreamed of portals and marketplaces - and they suddenly found business leaders who found themselves in a position to justify this sort of expenditure. Back then in my company, SAP was under great pressure in some areas (similar to what you said), because SAP reacted late to all of this. What I am trying to point out is that these business leaders were the same as before - no generation change as you suggested. Just very opportunist leaders.

I actually think that the real problem in most companies is not a generation change. It rather is a cultural thing. In the mainframe days IT departments very often were ruled by Finance departments - simply because the expenditure for these systems was so high. It was a major capital investment. Now although we’ve seen all this move on to client server and modern web technologies, most companies still have the old finance ruling structures in place. Not every company has a CIO or an IT boss on board level these days. Especially in the SME market that SAP is aiming for.

Being in IT since 1990 and using computers since 1983, I can’t agree more with your “purse strings” argument. But having said that - isn’t this what sort of happened during the Dotcom years ?