

More Thoughts on "Enterprise Software's Youth Drain" - neilc
http://blog.charleshudson.net/?p=378

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karzeem
Young people are doing a lot of stuff that could one day be considered
"enterprise" software; it's just that the suits that buy these things don't
trust them yet.

PG mentions this in his essay on colleges
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html>):

"There used to be a saying in the corporate world: 'No one ever got fired for
buying IBM.' You no longer hear this about IBM specifically, but the idea is
very much alive; there is a whole category of 'enterprise' software companies
that exist to take advantage of it. People buying technology for large
organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not
their money. They just want to buy from a supplier who seems safe--a company
with an established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, and software
that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarily a company that will
deliver so much as one that, if they do let you down, will still seem to have
been a prudent choice. So companies have evolved to fill that niche."

Companies used to buy mainframes, because they saw simpler machines as toy
computers. Even today, big companies might write a web app in Java when they
could write it much more easily in Python, because they see Python et al. as
toy languages. Similarly, there are a lot of apps out there, and there will
soon be many more, that the market will one day force companies to stop
labeling as toys.

------
edw519
Why so many "Enterprise vs. Web 2.0" discussions? As if you had to pick one of
the other.

The real gravy will be where the 2 meet and the ground will be fertile for the
7 million small business that the enterprise behemoths haven't been able to
crack. (Salesforce.com, anyone?)

So once the social networking phenomenon settles down and enterprise software
levels off, the real demand will be for people who understand both business
processes and modern technologies. Regardless of age.

