Under the title of Paying Less for More is the thought that software as a service, SaaS, is not only a new software delivery model but an opportunity to extricate ourselves from the expensive, robust software of old. There is a movement afoot to skinny down software. Make it usable not complex; reasonably priced not a rip-off. Back in my youth, some of which was spent in France, I knew a elderly man, a great cook actually, who used to joke that with a new Robot Coupe, a food processor, he could make leek and potato soup, homemade mayonnaise, cookie dough and wash the windows. When you look back at the explosion of software that took place in the 80s and 90s when software became something that everyone, not just specialists, used, the software looks like a kid who tries too hard to be noticed, taken seriously and respected. The software was way more than it ever needed to be. The typical word processor for example is a mess. It's not good enough to be used by a professional graphic artist or a professional publisher and it's way more than most of us would ever need for the most serious project. It also takes way too long to learn and is too expensive. Same problem in enterprise applications like Oracle and SAP. These programs are enormously complex. Buying them is itself a huge project. I have seen customers spend nearly as long on the contract negotiations as on the implementation, and both have been failures, frankly. Again, they are too complex and too expensive. Moreover, once you purchase one what leverage do you ever have again. You're not going to change after a 100 million investment. I actually heard of an Oracle client who threatened to switch to Peoplesoft if the problem they were experiencing was not resolved. Maybe that explains the acquisition. But only half of the problem is with the vendors. We the buyers keep wanting more and more. There are many users and managers in corporate America who really think that the food processor should wash the damn windows. No one wants to hear 'No'. We want more innovation and more robust functionality, but what we end up with is more complexity and more expense. We have been as immature as buyers as sellers have been as developers of software. Seller and buyer have created the perfect storm of bad software that we now live with, or step in. There are a lot of movements afoot that will start the process of maturation in the software market, for both the buyer and the seller. The advent of Agile Development where developers work through an iterative process of fairly quick development cycles with frequent input from users. Less time working on contracts and more time working on a usable system. Software as a service will also move us as sellers, buyers and users to a more mature software market. On-demand computing has an auto-constraint built into the system. Since the vendor must both write, debug, install, maintain and upgrade the software they are much more reasonable about what the software should and should not do. Gone are the days when it was going to do it all for every business, everywhere. Now I know that a lot of the professional software community will not buy any of this. The cynicism runs pretty deep from people who have had the code stolen from their computer and released when they ran out for lunch. I respect the pain and madness of the last 20 years of the software market. All I can say is that we are now moving forward with a lot less hype, a lot less venture capital and hopefully a more mature vision of what software can do to help us. And how about us? I think that we are ready to start turning a corner. More and more people in the marketplace are becoming system thinkers. Now that they have had a lot of experiences with software they have started to curb their most outlandish requests. I hear average business people say things like "Of course I know that anything can be done, but what about the costs, what about maintenance, what about usability?" Yeah, good questions, all. Keep 'em coming! | 
