Looks like I’m not the only one willing to eat their hat over this prediction. From 37signals:
Enterprise will follow legacy to become a common insult among software creators and users.
I didn’t want to use the word “insult”, so I went with a thinly vailed euphamism:
Enterprise Computing will become synonymous with complex, legacy code, the 21st century version of COBOL. The new cool thing? Web computing.
Software that tries to do 100% of the work will end up being too expensive to license, operate and maintain. It already is, even if most customers are not yet aware of the alternatives.
Of course software has to do 100% of what you intend it to do. But for an enterprise software vendor, 100% of what one customer needs is not 100% of what another customer needs. So they end up delivering 20% that gets used by everyone, and 80% they ends up a dead weight on anyone. That’s not a sustaintable approach.
In 2006 we’re going to see more focus on core features, simplicity and a return to integration. But it won’t be the EAI of yesterday. “Built to integrate” will be part of the initial design, and deliverables will be measured by how simple they are to pull apart and use.
The fore runners are mashups, simple solutions to well defined problems that arise from the integration of core features: maps, searches, listings. But the trend setters will be the big guys deciding to open up their APIs, and use simple interfaces designed from the bottom up.
Wait. That already happened.