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A master class in enterprise software sales fit into a single comment. Bravo!


Master class in why critical software that's relied on by millions wastes billions of people-hours each year, not to mention all the misery it causes.

The part where person making the purchase decision is neither the user nor beholden to the users? That's bad.


It doesn't matter if it's good or bad. It is.

In other words you can choose to play the game, or you can choose to fight the rules. I don't recommend the latter, it doesn't work.

Frankly I recommend the former - if you don't like the game, don't play. There are lots of other markets to play - enterprise software is just one of them. Other markets have different rules and you should find a market that suits your strengths.

While it frankly doesn't matter, I will point out that your comment that "its bad" should have the phrase "from my point of view" tacked on. You might even suggest it's bad from the "users point of view". But the "business point of view" is a different view, and also important. The ability to understand that point of view - and to best address those needs as well, are critical if you want to enter the Enterprise space. The business writes yhe check, not the user. The business is the customer not yhd user.

Or, to reference back to the original article, if you want to play in the Hospital Admin space you need to understand what hospital admin is, and what it needs. Are hospital admins asking for free unsupported, open source software, with funding models based on "hope"?

As software people we are seldom trained to understand business needs. Our career is in writing software for end users. We focus on technical things, complain about bloat or speed, are UI focused and think "user" when someone talks about "customer experience".

Google is the poster child for this. They push the technical boundaries, have really good products, do technical things really well, spend lots of yikes on UI etc. But I wouldn't depend on them for my business, because, frankly they're not dependable. They don't offer me customer (much less user) support. Their pricing is erratic and subject to change. And the service they provide may be gone tomorrow. They serve "me the user" but not "me the business". They're not "bad" - they just don't serve the needs I have.


I agree that this is spot on.

The last part missing is "build a flawed product and bake it into the contract so you charge high consultant costs to the customer to fix it" which is where the cash cow is for many enterprise / B2G products.


Well said




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