> Personally I think that big enterprise software and its sales model, as perfected by Oracle and SAP is dead long term, it will be killed by an on demand cloud products. HP maybe had a chance to get into this market eventually, and WebOS was part of his strategy
It's not going to be the market it once was, but those companies have very, very good reasons to use enterprise software: they can't rely on no-name cloud providers for legal and ass-covering reasons, they need the local installations and control of their infrastructure, and their sales structure is optimized for dealing with large corporations.
> And why does no one want to try to compete with Apple?
Doing your own hardware is expensive, and getting good margins much more so. HP hasn't made high-quality hardware in ages, and they can't possibly compete with Apple or Google's partners in the arena when they have to catch up and invest even more money than them.
Interesting perspective - Particularly as I see so much crappy enterprise software being installed in our company, for pretty much the reason you are communicating.
But, where does salesforce.com come into play? They seem to be pretty successful.
If I had to bet - it will be short-term (5-10 years) enterprise software continues to be successful. But longer term (10 years+) cloud software demolishes the whole concept of "Local installs and management of every enterprise software under the sun."
I doubt it. Yeah, it might be technically feasible. But politically? No way. Corporations are control freaks. I've seen it time and again - as corporations grow, they require a level of customization that generic third party cloud providers can't provide and they bring their infrastructure in-house.
... they can't rely on no-name cloud providers for legal and ass-covering reasons, they need the local installations and control of their infrastructure, ...
"Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers federal government agencies a secure, reliable, and cost-effective computing platform in the cloud. By using AWS products, government organizations can focus on meeting their mission-critical objectives, and spend less time procuring, developing, or managing IT resources. "
"Security: In order to provide end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy, AWS builds services in accordance with security best practices, provides appropriate security features in those services, and documents how to use those features. AWS’ compliance framework covers FISMA Low, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA."
It's not going to be the market it once was, but those companies have very, very good reasons to use enterprise software: they can't rely on no-name cloud providers for legal and ass-covering reasons, they need the local installations and control of their infrastructure, and their sales structure is optimized for dealing with large corporations.
> And why does no one want to try to compete with Apple?
Doing your own hardware is expensive, and getting good margins much more so. HP hasn't made high-quality hardware in ages, and they can't possibly compete with Apple or Google's partners in the arena when they have to catch up and invest even more money than them.