EVOLUTION OF BPR

Bill Gates falls victim to Featuritis disease

Posted on the June 25th, 2008 under Business Risk, Enterprise Software, Sales Force Automation by Gregory Yankelovich

I am not a fan of MS. The Apple zealots scary me. The fact that people get so emotional and irrational about a company, a technology or a product, has puzzled me for years. It is surely a testimony of the powerful Software Marketing machine, which turned a preference for tools into a religious war.

Bill Gates is falling a victim to the success of his own business model - “dazzle them with functions and features until they forget about reliability and performance”. Well it worked for a while, but it gets harder and harder to remember why I opened this program in the first place.

I don’t get this blogger’s frenzy about a 3 year old email either. Not that I do not see the irony, but did you really think that Bill unconditionally loves every piece of crap his company has ever produced? Is it a hate for everything Microsoft?

I find most software is designed by people who understand marketing much better than the processes they are suppose to make easier to execute. Personally I do not find Mac any more intuitive than PC, but they sure market much better and I admire that. And is there less hate for Oracle than Microsoft, because Larry got less money than Bill? Or does anyone really think that Oracle Financial’s, or any other Oracle business application, is less convoluted and frustrating for users than Dynamics? You may have noticed that I don’t even want to mention the usability of SAP products.

It seems the Software Giants got themselves into a position similar to the Telephone Giants, they are more interested in protecting their cash flows than innovating and re-building from scratch. If they treat their existing code and architecture as a capital investment, such a strategy makes financial sense, but..