Brian Manning put it nicely in a comment to my post yesterday about enterprise software:
In my opinion, enterprise technology is WAY behind consumer technology for one reason: because it can be.
In a [B2B] transaction, one good salesperson (the “seller”) only has to sell one person (the “buyer”) on the value of the technology. Once the product is sold, the buyer forces their 50,000 employees to use that technology whether they like it or not. A good salesperson with a good deck can do this fairly reliably.
And a good account manager can typically retain the client for a while; employees usually get used to the product and rarely complain enough for the buyer to cancel the contract and force the seller to improve the product. As a result, an enterprise product can suck and still flourish.
With a B2C product, this is much, much more difficult. The seller has to sell 50,000 individual “users”, one by one, on the value of the product without the luxury of a face to face meeting or 18 holes on the golf course. The B2C model forces the seller’s product to “sell itself”.
As a result, a consumer product can’t suck if it wants to flourish. It has be good. Much better than the enterprise product needs to be.
Fortunately, as I discussed yesterday, trends like cloud-based delivery (aka SaaS) are starting to align the interests of enterprise users and buyers.
