Found in a hacker news thread, this reply echos my thinking on the missed opportunities in SaaS. It’s also why it upsets me to see so many smart people working on so many social products.

Enterprise software sucks.

We don’t talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don’t see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater.

And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It’s so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done.

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is.

What banks were in the 1930’s, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.

The Sirens of Social have seduced too many good minds to build and crash startups. There are too many brilliant problem solvers who aren’t developing brilliant solutions for business. Enterprise software is particularly awful. Imagine the progress that could be made and the money that’s being left on the table. They could be blowing competition out of the water. Sad.