The "badness" of enterprise software is something that I've recently been brainstorming a lot about. I think there are two fundamental reasons for the "badness

The "badness" of enterprise software is something that I've recently been brainstorming a lot about. I think there are two fundamental reasons for the "badness" of enterprise software. 1) Too many cooks spoil the broth. Most enterprise software packages cater to be everything to everyone. Most absolutely great products are the vision of a small team (see: most of apple products, OS X, iPod, etc. in other marketplaces: the dyson vacuum, amazon, zappos, etc.) Unfortunately, some of the worst products are also the result of a small team. (apple hi-fi, apple tv, newton) It's funny how when these products fail, pundits blame it on their inability to listen to the marketplace; however, when they succeed, pundits say that "they stuck with their convictions to make a winning product". It's simply safer for big companies to develop a product that's "everything for everybody". Windows, SAP, etc., can push these products through b/c they have an awesome salesforce. It's amazing to me how easy it is for big companies to sell inferior products, simply because of their existing mindshare. If it's one thing big companies know how to do, it's leverage this. Additionally, developer hours are expensive. It's easier to make a profit by "customizing" a product to a user (which you can bill for), rather than create a whole new product (this product doesn't exist yet, but we can make it and maybe they'll buy it vs. "oh yeah, our product can already do that, we just need to tweak it to your needs") As a startup, it's easy to fail developing "everything for everybody". Actually, since you're small and the big players are really big, the odds are stacked against you- you're almost guaranteed to fail. I feel like the only way to succeed is if you aim high- push for the real innovation. Throw out everything, and re-think everything from the ground up. These ideas will probably also fail- for every iPod, there's an Apple TV. For every google search, there's a google youtube (which is very neat, but doesn't make any money). Still, I feel like this model is the best opportunity at creating something revolutionary, instead of being just another ho-hum also ran. The only two startup companies that I've seen attack the enterprise market really well are 37 Signals and Fog Creek. For most of their products, they threw out everything and started from scratch- they created their vision. They've both been wildy successful, but even with this approach, they have some mediocre products (CityDesk, for example).