Recently George Ou posted a blog earlier this month entitled Enterprise software is crappy and it isn’t going to change any time soon. It's interesting because of all of the back and forth chatter being spun up by Bill Gates, Robert Scoble, Michael Krigsman, and Nick Carr. Now I know two of these guys personally. In my humble opinion they have no idea what they're talking about; still they're talking. That's what is important here. The questions they ask, and the comments they make are very relevant to growing our business over the next 3 to 5 years. Here's George's opening statement from his blog:
What started off as Bill Gates wondering why Enterprise software can’t get some blogosphere love and attention has turned in to a raging debate on why Enterprise software sucks. First Robert Scoble chimes in and asks why enterprise software isn’t sexy, then Michael Krigsman says Scoble doesn’t understand enterprise software, then Nick Carr says Krigsman is the one not understanding, and then it goes back and forth.
Of course everyone is generalizing here since “enterprise software” is a huge category of software that encompasses many things and many aspects so there’s probably a lot of talking past each other going on. This is a classic case of the more technically oriented Krigsman giving perfectly good reasons for the state of enterprise software and the user oriented Scoble and Carr saying I don’t care why it sucks just fix the damn thing.
If enterprise software is not sexy, then we need to ask ourselves one question. Why not? I think the main issue is the complete misuse of the term "enterprise". That, and the complete denial within enterprise companies that the lines between consumer software and enterprise software are blurring more and more each day.
So is enterprise software really crappy? I don't think so. I think the statements made in this blog are broad generalizations and don't really give the discussion the merit it needs to effect change. However, If the statements made are true then I have a question for the community. What can we do to make sure the systems management side of the house isn't "crappy"? 
