

‘Enterprisey’ Apps Suck - cek
http://blog.sriramk.com/post/10736275975/enterprisey

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makecheck
Very true.

One thing that seems very important to companies is _support_ , i.e. "what if
it breaks". This also tends to trump everything else, even the cost of an
acquisition or its quality (frankly, many IT departments have a CYA policy).
Even _free_ software that is demonstrably superior in every way to some
overpriced enterprisey solution could be shot down if it's not clear how
someone would install and maintain the app, and if it's not clear where to go
if the app exploded tomorrow.

While it _is valid_ to question how an app will be supported, I think that IT
departments tend to give this too much weight and spend too little time
thinking about what else they might do. "Run screaming to tech support person
from vendor" is not a disaster recovery plan, but in too many organizations
that seems to be all there is.

What is the probability of an incident? How severe can the problems be? Would
those problems have work-arounds? And ultimately, can all critical data be
accessed and backed up regularly just in case of a failure? In the well-
designed free software that I've seen, these questions have great answers and
there's usually some bonuses like support forums, source code, and hundreds of
known users worldwide. In other words, risk is pretty small and there is
definitely some reward, but it requires your IT people to actually invest a
little time to learn and to keep things moving (for example, to install new
versions regularly and to brush up on scripting skills).

