The Applicator

Over the past 20 years, the American Airlines nonstop between BOS and SFO has been a fixture of the software industry. Almost any time you took it, you’d see friends, and even when you didn’t, you’d be sure you hadn’t boarded the wrong plane, just because of the number of Oracle bags.

This flight is no more. A little more than a month from now, American Airlines will end non-stop service between SFO and BOS.

Why? The commuters left American for JetBlue and Virgin America, for better seats, better entertainment, fewer niggling charges, and maybe even better treatment. I saw this myself when I actually got ** an upgrade ** on American a few weeks ago, and I confirmed it by talking to a frequent commuter who had gone over to Jet Blue even though he had more than a million and a half miles on American.

I wonder. Is this how other empires crumble? In my world, you have SAP and Oracle, seemingly as unassailable as the Great Wall of China, but both offering an experience that has been compromised by excess investment in an aging infrastructure, a labor force that has been asked to shoulder most of the burden imposed by this infrastructure, and a management that grew up in the good old days and still (my guess is) secretly longs for them.

For a long time, people like myself stayed with American. And while that was happening, the management could fool itself. Leather seats? No fees? These don’t matter to our loyal customer base, so we don’t need to invest the boodle that we don’t have in matching the competition. Until, of course, the day it did matter, when there was nothing they could do.

What are the moral equivalents of leather seats and fee-less flying in the enterprise applications market? Oh, it’s any number of things. It’s the fact that search, if it’s there at all, is just about as cumbersome as search was on AltaVista. It’s the fact that doing anything, anything unfamiliar requires the equivalent of a Type III license and just about as much training. It’s the endless, endless wait for even the most trivial or needed changes in the system. It’s the fact that you can’t use them on an iPhone or an iPad or even a Mac. (It’s amazing how many enterprise application companies are IE only.)

Please feel free to add to the list. It’s kind of fun.

Oh, people can and will put up with it for a really long time. But eventually, if the competition is smooth and persistent, they can march into a market and take it from the behemoths. I think you’re seeing this today where Workday is replacing PeopleSoft 7.5, and you saw it a few years ago when Salesforce was replacing Siebel. It does happen.

Now if only I could remember my JetBlue frequent flyer number.