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Software Market Assertion: Why are so many software companies SO disfunctional (sic)?

softwaremaven

corrigan

Things are tough all over for software product managers. Layoffs, mergers, the general market and all kinds of spooky downturn stuff, but that just might not be all that is afoot which just might make some software companies increasingly dysfunctional.   Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on “The Do It Yourself Economy” asserts:

In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. economy today is actually being hit by two tsunamis at once: The Great Recession and the Great Inflection.

The Great Inflection is the mass diffusion of low-cost, high-powered innovation technologies – from hand-held computers to Web sites that offer any imaginable service – plus cheap connectivity. They are transforming how business is done. The Great Recession you know.

The “good news” is that the Great Recession is forcing companies to take advantage of the Great Inflection faster than ever…

Pervasive connectivity and access to most of the needed capabilities online for the typical user is presenting markets new ways to manage transactional interactions for businesses, marketers and buyers.   Doubt it?

  • Are you sending more text messages?
  • Did you get yourself one of those Twitter accounts?
  • How are those people from high school on Facebook?
  • Did you upload your latest presentation on Slideshare?
  • How’s that Ning Community you set up for your customers?
  • Did you update your leads via a mobile application for salesforce.com/insert other business application?
  • Needed to send a file which was too big for email through an online tool?

We’ve gone mobile, we like our applications in bite sized feature sets and if you could deliver it as a service that would be best for the prosumer.   This prosumer driven cloud consumption has just got to be impacting the fundamental mechanics of the software markets, right?

While I have no idea what was the driver to @softwaremaven’s question, I do think the the whole impact of SaaS/the cloud and the rise of the prosumer is making product management tough in legacy software companies and just might be making them increasingly dysfunctional.

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