Bob Zurek

In thinking about the software platform topic, I found myself thinking more about how I feel that bloated, monolithic and extremely complex software is DEAD.

Think about it for a minute, the industry is littered with monolithic and extremely complex software products. It comes in the form of feature bloat (you frequently hear that only 20% of the features of a software product are truely valuable to a majority of the user), installation (how long is it really going to take this piece of software to install, how many disks, how many pieces need I need to install before I install this software onto the stack), user experience (dealing with 1000's of dialog boxes, menu items, text boxes, drop down lists, "where the heck am I in this software", etc). 

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as you know. I can sense you are shaking your head up and down as you have probably been a part of building such a solution. In addition, the industry has had a propensity to cobble  various software products together into "Suites" further exasperating the compexities of the solution. This cobbling together approach causes all kinds of additional bloat and complexities for weaving together the various products which in turn extends the release cycle from months to years. Then, you go from Suite to Platform. "We are no longer selling a "Suite" of products, we are offering you a "Platform"". Yes, many companies have created compelling "platforms" and in a sense you can see how this has evolved. But, when taking a platform approach, some users start to object as they just don't want to deal with all this complexity and feature boat that sometimes comes with monolithic and extremely complex software. In fact, when you add things like security, redundancy, storage, the operating system, etc underneath and on top of the platform, you get even more monolithic, bloated and extreme complexity. 

So, what happens next,  users begin to retract, they begin to look around for more simple, flexible and adaptable solutions that truely address the direct need.  You hear users saying "All I want to do is X, I don't need all this other stuff" and as much as the sales reps try to showcase the value of the platform, the user just migh say that they want X and stick to it, X representing the task at hand and the solution they need to get going on.  Furthermore, you might hear "Can I just buy the X feature from you". But wait, even the X feature may be monolithic and complex, so the user / buyer continues their  search for a focused solution that is simple and gets the job done. This could come in the form of an appliance version of a focused product, a low cost open source solution or even as a SaaS solution in today's world. You and I know this very well. Never mind the perpetual license discussion that could be brought to bear in this topic area. 

My sense at this junction is that monolithic and extremely complex software platforms or even database solutions  will eventually die and fade and that they will quietly and quickly be displaced by emerging offerings that are simple and rapidly made available to address the requirements of the users without them having to add machine after machine just to scale. Its time to spend more time on making things simpler but with ability to support the needs of the user whether a small shop or a big shop. That's one of the areas we are very focused on here at Infobright, making data warehousing easy yet reliable and scalable without adding significant bloat and complexities. In the business intelligence space,  a good example of simplicity is illustrated by Lyzasoft, if you haven't checked them out, I would encourage you to give it a try. A good illustration of simplicity without complexity.