Are cheap marketing strategies going to dumb down all future Software?

noticing the automatic addition of an advertisement at the end of the post, just before publishing it.

I was actually introducing a survey we’ve been working on, to understand the current Siebel CRM projects scenario and the opinions of people working on it.

Can you guess what the automatically added advertisement was about? Well, as soon as you put CRM in the context, you can be sure you will get a Salesforce.com advertisement.

Nothing against the guys, but what the heck had this to do with our Siebel projects' survey? Fortunately enough LinkedIn has still the decency of allowing you to cancel these automatic advertisements, but what if a less focused author does not notice this?

I actually received an update once, where a guy was promoting some Siebel positions, while at the bottom there was the same Salesforce.com advertisement. I commented on his post, underlying how hilarious this was, but I am not sure he got it...

After a certain period of time, while some comments were published on one of the posts related to the survey, a totally out of context comment arrived. A company using a Salesforce image, trying to sell Salesforce.com training? Oh man.. “Extremely affordable Salesforce/SFDC CRM hands on based training for all roles”.. I immediately thought “what the heck has this to do with our Survey? Can’t you guys use proper space to make your own advertisement?.. Ok, let’s flag this as inappropriate, I am sure LinkedIn will delete this posts as out of the contextual discussion”. You wanna bet on the result? Well, you just have to click on the link and see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Are-you-taking-part-in-41388.S.5905974750093537283? (note how they delicately removed the Oracle Siebel keyword from the link).

Ok, so Salesforce.com is still spending a lot of money (LinkedIn thanks) to make the guerrilla marketing that characterized its first battles against the one time giant of CRM solutions (remember the fake protesters outside Siebel marketing events?) Mmm... Interesting.

But let’s now discuss about the real reasons behind this recent cloud, “light” solutions' proliferation in corporations. After having talked with an Oracle guy working on the “new” Sales Cloud application, I have a personal confirmation and a wider awareness of the reasons behind a potential impoverishment of the IT business solutions. This guy mentioned that he recently attended a training but I could not understand exactly about what, until he said he wanted to improve his selling skills, in order to be able to better promote the Cloud solutions. When I heard him playing the part of the seller: “because software is for you, sales people, you are the king, you should be the ones deciding what you get: do you want this crap, slow solution, or you want this fancy and easy to use interface?”.

Ah, now I see.. .So, “cloud” solutions are winning because the perception (easily sold) is that cloud applications are more user friendly and you can tweet and post on Facebook with them? You can bet on it.

But what has this to do with the Cloud paradigm? A company should abandon years of on-premise investment because ferocious assault of cheap marketing strategy of IT corporations? Show me the ROI man! Are you sure we cannot get a cool user interface and mobile application that synchronize with your on-premise servers? You might want to check better the latest solutions.

I see the added value of cloud based applications in the case some information is meant to be directly transferred from a sales rep and his/her manager, for example: in such a case, it absolutely makes sense to make use of the widespread cloud services, rather than burden the company server infrastructure. At the end of the day the goal of IT has always been that of simplifying our lives and tasks as workers. But... wait a minute, didn’t we say - in the glorious CRM propaganda days - that CRM is about business and not the technology? Do CRM applications (or CX, as now they like to call them) really need to be on the cloud to be easy to use? For sure I challenge that an application has to be in the cloud to be well engineered. But there’s food for thought.

One thing companies should be aware of, above all in the IT departments, is that with a cloud solution you will 100% lose control of the data layer of your application: every vendor in the market has locked up the data schemes and layer of their cloud solutions; you can add the fields, some out of the box relations, but don’t think to get deeper than that - optimization, partitioning, denormalization and database maintenance (just to name a few) will be history.

An added value for some companies for sure, it’s anyway a dangerous track to follow, in my opinion, even if Larry Ellison says you can now simply push a button to put your on-Prem solution in the Cloud.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad with the current trends, if the reasons companies are making strategic decisions are the correct ones. It’s actually a certain part of IT’s fault if business users were so frustrated by very poor and too heavy applications if now we are in this situation. As for marketing strategies, they have always been and they will always be where the money is flowing. But innovation is usually a disruptive element in the status quo and I have a huge sense of innovation lack in business software nowadays.

Am I the only one having this bitter sensation that all these cheap marketing strategies are going to dumb down the entire business software production, completely abandoning professional software engineering?

P.S. The images were taken from RugRag, but I like them as a metaphor for companies going to the cloud: it works, but it’s not for everyone.