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This is ridiculous.

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Disparaging language without reasoning does not make an argument

In reply to This is ridiculous.

I’ve read some of your other posts and bio – clearly you’re not a daft person, which makes me wonder why you’re having so much issue understanding my point.

You seem to think my “90%+” statement is a contradiction to my statement that change costs. This is about the furthest thing from a contradiction possible… that “90%+” figure is the case precisely because of the high cost of change. When you’ve weighed up the true costs involved the cost of change will outweigh the benefits 90% of the time.

I’m not against looking at alternatives seriously. Don’t forget that this has already been done; you did it when you first decided to go with your current software. That means you know what’s out there, you have a fair idea of the licensing costs, you know the limitation of the alternatives that stopped you choosing them in the first place etc etc. When looking at alternate software most of the products in the category will be totally unsuitable. That’s just life with software – finding something that is a good fit with your business is hard – many software titles won’t have the features you require, and the ones that do are likely to be complex and expensive. Generally there are only a couple of options that are about the right fit. Will one of these other viable options have improved significantly since you last looked around? Maybe. Does that mean you should look at making a change? Possibly, but you should only give consideration to a change if the current software you are using has major deficencies (feature-set ones generally – since you are using thecurrent software the technical issues should all be sorted, or at least worked around… you shouldn’t be changing software to something that is better at the back-end after you’ve already figured out the back-end issues with the existing software).

If your current software doesn’t have major deficencies it doesn’t make sense to spend several hours/weeks to seriously investigate options to change. Let’s say you do all the investigation of options, you trial each one, and one of them is absolutely ideal for your company. This is the best-case scenario. When you take your proposal to management what are they going to ask you? “How much is it going to cost?” and “What’s the pay-off?”. If the existing software is functional there isn’t going to be a significant pay-off. But there is going to a significant cost (I’ve given an overview of the main ones a few times before, often the smallest of these is the software license). Without that significant benefit the answer is going to be “no”, because the business case for change isn’t there. If you’ve come this far you have now cost the company a significant amount of money in paying you to research alternatives, you have wasted management’s valueable time, and the time you have spent doing this is time you have not been spending on other useful things. This is why it is irresponsible to follow this path unless the current software is totally deficient. And in my experience current software is totally deficient less than 10% of the time.

You can use language like “bias” and “excuses” all you like, but that’s no substitute for valid reasoning. You have ridiculed my “90%+” number without either a) listening to where the number comes from or b) addressing why you think it is wrong. It would help a lot if you were to offer some reasoning, or an alternate process, or even some of your own anecdotal evidence to back what you are saying.

The 2-second process, as I stated at the time when I first mentioned it, is the case precisely because this process has already been gone through exhaustively when you first chose the software, and because of the heavy investment you have already made in the existing software. There’s a time and a place for looking at the alternatives more exhaustively (ie, when you’re in the ‘other’ 10%, or if you haven’t looked at the alternatives for a while). Most of the time though, as stated previously, this will not be the case.

“…if a two-second process … was all that was used to come to that conclusion, it was chosen for the wrong reasons”
Are you deliberatly misinterpreting my statements? Clearly choosing a bit of software in the first place is not a 2-second process. It’s the evaluation of alternatives when you’re already commited to a solution that may be 2 seconds.

“that’s complete BS…”
Hardly. But your responses are heading in that direction. Are you actually interested in a serious discussion, or just making denigrating statements? At least you have given one example to back up your statement this time – malware defense. This is partially correct (while a yearly subscription is essential, almost all products are cheaper to renew than to buy in the first place… a type of subscription that I made mention of in the paragraph you are supposedly disproving). Anti-malware is more of an exception than a rule though. It requires a subscription because you are getting new content all the time – the virus definitions. A lot of other commercial software has no such new content, and therefore can be bought as a perpetual license (or as a high up-front cost plus lower annual renewal fee to cover updates and support type license). So, what exaclty is it you are disagreeing with here?

As with your other statements, I am unsure where your last one has come from. I have done a pretty thorough job of outlining all the considerations. If you reply, it would be useful for you to offer some actual justification. There are plenty of other forums on the ‘net that flagrant language and factless trolling are more suited to. Given you’ve written articles for TR, I would have thought you’d want to keep such verbiage away from the discussions.

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