Would you come for advise to a doctor who cannot pronounce Health Care? I wouldn’t and it is mystifying why companies would want to pay for CRM research report from AMR - “The Customer Management Market Sizing Report, 2007-2012″ if it’s analysts do not understand that CRM stands for Relationship Management - not Customer Management. Even Wikipedia does not recognize such a thing. I would guess because there is no such thing. You can attempt to manage customers, but it will not be a very long attempt or very successful one because there will be no customers any more to manage.

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It appears that an average human brain has difficulties to hold on to a concept or idea for a period of time that is a long enough to see that idea or concept materialized. Since we are constantly bombarded by never ending stream of information, many have a propensity to develop intellectual ADHD. The idea of concentrating on “One Thing” as a secret of happiness and success is widely propagated in popular culture, but in business reality it does not often generate profitable quarters.

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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..

I have been reading lately a lot about “social software” and its impact on businesses large and small. It appears to me, and I am definitely not an expert, that the term’s definitions, which are many, boils down to three product groups:

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Much has been written lately about traditional enterprise applications essentially being data entry “forms” and reporting structures, which are implemented to support desirable business processes and practices. It is surely a very complex set of structures, and it takes a very large number of professionals to design, maintain and upgrade these structures to ensure proper functionality, security, availability and performance for a very large number of customers. The most important reason for the rise of the Enterprise Application Software industry was economy of scale. Only 30 years ago all business applications were internally developed by a company’s IT organizations or contractors, with one exception of a General Ledger application available from McCormick & Dodge. The supply of qualified professionals was outstripped by the demand for software by a very wide margin.

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