Red Hat CEO Says Software Vendor Model Is Broken 223
alphadogg writes "The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems. 'The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.' Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about $1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that 'easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year,' he said."
No Shit (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, who the fuck didn't know?
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Informative)
Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.
Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you miss the part where I said:
If I'm booking an onsite technician for instance, they are not going to be onsite at 7am, I'm not sending anyone out that early in the morning, yet it's completely possible they'll be doing work after hours starting at 6 or 7.
In the same light, I'm not sending anyone out to start work at 8pm, but would quite happily have someone going out at 8am.
In this case, what is "retarded" about having a rule that determines that 8 .. 11 is AM and 12, 1 ... 7 is PM?
In the extremely rare situation that this rule doesn't apply, enter the time as "7" for instance and it gets corrected to 07:00 AM, change the A to a P and you're done. Either that, or enter the time as "7p" and it's put in as 7:00 PM
Or would you rather have to enter every single time value as hh:mm:ss AM|PM explicitly?