The Gong Show

Scoble’s musings on why enterprise software isn’t sexy takes a narrow view of enterprise software. The enterprise software that really excites me is the stuff that’s aimed at consumers initially, and then consumers bring the software into the enterprise from the bottom up, solving their individual problems first and being adopted by the organization once many of the employees are already using the solution. Visible Path uses this exact model for selling into the enterprise: wait for individual consumer adoption in a company, and then once those individuals reach a certain threshold, sell into the CIO.

Some examples of this bottom-up enterprise software adoption pattern:

The quintessential example is IM. AIM was initially looked upon as the frivolous time-waster of 90s-teenagers. Now, it’s a staple of every office. In my last job IMing was so critical to productivity that we had a corporate Jabber network setup so that everyone would know each other’s screennames.

Linux evolved into a crucial enterprise developers’ tool because students were taught how to program on the open source operating system in universities, and then they brought their academic Linux experience into the work place to solve engineering problems.

I find bottom up pattern of enterprise adoption interesting because consumer software is much more focused on user experience than enterprise software, so the result is often much more user friendly software. Traditional enterprise software developers simply aren’t incentivized to design nice interfaces because a good-looking UI is not what’s going to land the big contract with a Fortune 500 CIO.