Crack Addicted Invisible Hand
In Scoble’s blog Why enterprise software isn’t sexy, he asks a simple question, “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?” A lot of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars have taken Robert to task about this, saying that it is in reality sexy:
“[B]eauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder… [seeing] UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD - and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets - with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that?”
Vinnie does a great job showing how underneath the ugly exterior enterprise software is amazing and sexy. Most of these posts are all missing the important comparison Scoble is making that Nick Carr picks up on here:
perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use
The post from Michael Krigsman(which although Nick beats up on chooses not to link to) talks about, how all this isn’t relevant because enterprise software is “intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on.”
Enterprise vendors need to be keenly aware of the consumer market but, SAP’s customers don’t pay them to run around like Scoble and chase every new technology/website that comes out. They pay them to make measured, smart choices with what they create and how they spend their R&D money. Their customers do indeed expect the software they create to have a “a high degree of reliability, security, scalability.”
Enterprise vendors have an advantage – they can ride on top of the frothy startup market cherry picking things that work well and will deliver value back to an enterprise’s bottom line. In the consumer tech industry, the invisible hand of the market is addicted to crack and has the attention span of a two year old. The consumer market is chaotic, jumpy and prone to fickleness. Online companies/ideas are created and destroyed everyday, and it is up to Scoble and other followers of tech to survey what’s out there, they need the thousands of readers. The two industries have totally different business models, Twitter needs millions of users to monetize their software, SAP is very profitable on about 40k “users” world wide.
This shows the Enterprise software market is much more focused and so is their advertising. Dan Farber does an excellent job of handling this topic and refocusing the discussion on what Gates actually said:
The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they’re going to tell me about business computing; no, it’s all about consumer computing
LiveSide.net - Bill Gates, Mix n Mash, and the future of Microsoft
Dan goes on to point out why ZDnet covers enterprise topics:
We recognize that in the 21st century you cannot easily separate the two, given technology is deeply embedded in work and personal lives… [T]he financial equation is not just about page views or number of readers–more important is the quality of readers we draw into the ZDNet orbit
Who am I to contradict Dan when it comes to the determination of advertising revenue — after all he is the Editor in Chief of ZDnet. In the advertising arena you can also point to things like SAP sponsoring golf stars, tennis pros, formula one cars, etc. Who watches these things? CIOs, and other TLA execs who make these decisions. If SAP cared about CPM they would advertise with NASCAR. Let’s just give SAP the benefit of the doubt that they understand their market more then Scoble.
I couldn’t agree more that Enterprise vendors need to make things easier to use and an all around friendlier experience but, they need to be smart and measured because that’s what their customers want.