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Enterprise software is designed to demo well (that means lots of well exposed one dimensional features) and differentiate against competitors in demos/shootouts. Everything else is secondary - design, usability. This makes it easy to sell, but leads to high levels of dissatisfaction - (i.e. the 80% failure rate of CRM or ERP or ATS software).

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I will take it one step further. Enterprise software is designed to "sell". In enterprise software, the buyer and the user are not the same person and the buyer has the power. That is why enterprise software sales is so bloated.

We build and sell enterprise software and our strength is design. The way we work around this problem is that we are selling only to early adopters and have also open sourced our product. We are not getting the big bucks, but its starting to show result.

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