As someone who still works in an IT department at a large company, I think 37signals has a valid point. It's not the only point (and there are many), but it is

As someone who still works in an IT department at a large company, I think 37signals has a valid point. It's not the only point (and there are many), but it is a good one. As much as most enterprise software sucks, it's at least 3 times as bad trying to install or upgrade it. Enterprise software companies know their customers have deep pockets, which is what support contracts are all about. They purposely make the documentation too confusing or too sparse so they can push the "value" of their yearly support contract. Once you've bought the basic support contract, they tend not to have many more answers than what you can get from the documentation. Of course, you can buy higher levels of support where they'll send someone to be onsite to work on your problems (which means even more money). By this time, you've already spent so much time and your manager has spent so much money on this stuff, that it's too embarrassing for your manager to admit to his bosses that he's made a mistake and your stuck with the crappy software.