I'm not sure where this originates from, but the most succinct definition I've heard for "Enterprise Software" is that the person who pays for it isn't the person who uses it.
I have a friend who works in a sales role for IBM. He told me that part of his bonus is contingent on being able to prove that the customer has actually installed the software which they bought.
The policy apparently arose because certain public sector entities had refused to consider new deals since they still hadn't got round to installing the software for which they had paid millions of dollars, years before.
It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it.
Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion dollar consultancy companies engage in.
Plus IBM makes even more doing the “integration” than the original sale.
The result was huge margins for IBM and customers scratching their heads afterwards.
Not so great as an actual business.
One of the things I like about SaaS software is that a subscription revenue stream is more closely aligned with actually delivering value than a long-term sales model is. It's still not perfect, but I'll take what I can get.
The same goes for companies like LinkedIn - they are now driven by recruiters and not the end users. Thus the idiotic interface and functionality changes that basically makes it unusable [to the most of the users].
Except, perhaps, in Japan - where mobile handsets were way ahead in terms of design and features as compared with the U.S.
Which, I think, can also be explained by the fact that the handsets in Japan were marketed to the end users as opposed to the U.S. where the buyers were the network operators.
As much as I loved simpler Nokia handsets, N-Gage is not what I would consider an innovation.
A personal opinion, of course.
— Joel Spolsky, In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...
If you're FedEx, you don't buy someone else's logistics software package, you build your own.
My example is when looking at daycare for my kid. They all boast about this app the teachers use to take pictures, update about their day, what they ate, when they went to the bathroom. In practice, each some teachers did it more than others, some none at all. When I would watch them, they'd be taking pictures with their iPads and spending time filling things out in lieu of other duties like watching the kids (although, most updates came during nap time after they had tidied up).
It pitches really well, but not quite necessary, and is often a huge time suck. I often still ask questions that app could answer (when did they have an accident, what happened? Did they eat all of their lunch? Did they nap today?) but I don't need a tedious record, just an occasional checkin.
-it's very hard to sell
-usually it's crap
-maintenance is expensive
-many use it just to keep their job
-many furtively use better products from young startups
Do you consider the G Suite to be enterprise software?