Sex Appeal
Scoble notes enterprise software isn't sexy.
Very true - and very obvious. Not sexy - to the Street, to buyers, to suppliers, to complementors, to much of anyone.
There's a simple way to make enterprise software sexy - apart from ditching the ridiculously awful jargonized name (I mean, seriously - how can anything called "enterprise xyz" be sexy, unless it's a starship?).
Enterprise software is lame because it offers little potential for revolutionizing anything - market space, value propositions, industry economics, strategies, etc. That's why software players are able to create less and less value - the marginal gains to software are shrinking because "enterprise software" only impacts relatively the lowest value of value activities.
Simple version: edge beats core - so investing in software that provides a tiny marginal benefit to activities focused purely on the core is necessarily a losing bet.
In contrast, if software guys started focusing on what's
really wrong with the economy/industries - instead of providing low-value point solutions to minor-league information problems - the sex appeal would happen, in spades.
The real evidence, though, is the sheer boringness of Scoble's post - the ideas to jargon ratio is like 2:10,000. That's not his fault (ok, only kind of), but a deeper intellectual poverty within the software industry itself.
I've found an interesting comment in that debate - basically he says that people don't comment on their daily life with enterprise software. He does not go into the conclusion - but it's kind of obvious - if the software vendors don't get feedback from the people that really use their stuff (and only get reviews from journalists who just take a screenshot of the app and skim the list of it's features) - then they will not produce anything that meets the users real needs.
I guess it's one of your 'edge strategies' to enable the real users to give feedback - but I can see why corporations would be scared about that kind of feedback.
