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The Death of the $1 Million Software Package

Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company’s enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days are over, as my latest column for Business 2.0 reports.

2 Comments

  1. Dylan Tweney

    One irate reader says:

    “Shed no tears for the vendors? It’s called jobs. How many years out of school are you?”

    For the record, dear reader, jobs or not, the inability of software companies to sell bloated $1 million products is called “competition.” And I’m enough years out of school that this is my second recession as a member of the workforce.

  2. Scot Hacker

    Some people have a sense of entitlement that makes them think the world owes them outrageous sums of bread just because they got away with it in the past.

    Your invocation of “competition” tells only half the story. Open source software doesn’t really “compete,” at least not in the business sense of the world. Rather, it does an end run around the economics, fueled by satisfaction rather than $.

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