Features with a tiny "f"

Over a decade ago, Larry Ellison had derided younger vendors like Ariba, E.piphany and Commerce One:

“These things aren’t companies, they’re features!”

If those were mere features what to make of the millions of single threaded mobile apps and web services that have emerged in the last few years?

And frankly, what to make of offerings of even bigger vendors when you consider their place in the portfolio of buyer applications. In my recent book research, I have talked to company after company which have 50, 100, 500 IT projects underway. And  as they describe what they are innovating, they are mentioning specific vendors only so often.

Two reasons – few vendors are helping them much with their strategic product/service/business model innovation, and buyers are custom building at a pace not seen in a long time.

But nobody seems to have told the social nets that. You have the SAP community where no matter what the customer problem, HANA is the answer. Ditto with the Enterprise 2.0 crowd. You get functional specialists – accountants, HR, procurement etc – who appear sublimely uninterested in all the innovation happening elsewhere in the enterprise and keep hyping their own functional vendors.

Maybe Larry will slap some humility back into the market. Frankly, many customers are already making their own calls.