Have you noticed how all the startups are focused on building end user oriented solutions, rarely do we hear about a start up based on innovative products targeting corporate. Even though corporate happen to be spending much more money over the years than normal users and have a huge room for improvement. If you think about it, your gmail account is far more advanced than anything used within corporate. The question here is how come innovative products start their lives as user targeted products to be later on ported into corporate. How come the apps and tools I use in my personal life is light ages ahead of anything I use at work.
the answer here is job security, the driving force behind most of the decision makers in corporate world make their decisions in pursuit for promotions, certain options are safer than others. Basically no one wants to take an adventure and become an early adopter of a none proven technology, they just want to pick the product everybody else does, the product they can’t be blamed for using.
Siebel is not as stable as salesForce, yet siebel is much more popular in corporate just because it provides safety for the people picking it. It is the industry standard after all, so they can’t be blamed for taking an in-calculated risk.
Corporate buys security before anything else, and other than few outliers no executive is willing to introduce new software that has the potential to compromise his career if it ever fails, even if the failure possibility is much lower than that of its “corporate approved” alternative. Even new products must originate from one of their approved vendors IBM/Oracle/MS/EMC, breaking into that market is almost impossible.
The sad thing here is us people working in corporate have to live with sub par products that are far less resilient than the products we use in our personal lives, just because corporate execs choose security over quality. Also as innovators can’t really offer solutions/products for issues we see on daily basis since its quite hard to find an executive who’d risk his career to try a new and unproven technology.
