The state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away.

Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.

The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.

These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.

This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.

It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.

Charlie Munger once said something to the effect of "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes".

There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold. Those things cost money. Money paid for those things is money not paid to shareholders, and that's the ultimate incentive in our system.

They've got you by the balls, and secretly, your CEO thinks their CEO is a genius for thinking up and implementing that business model. Pay up.

It seems like these problems are related to software and a certain size of corporation that is selling it. VMWare isn't hoping to make a few $million, they want/need to make a few $billion. And it is absolutely a race to the bottom when you can get Proxmox for free. Nevermind Harvester and some of the other projects out there are are doing kinds of similar things.

I was a beta tester for VMWare way back when. It was one of the first pieces of software I bought out of college. It was like manna from heaven, I could commit to Linux and have a backdoor for Windows and I needed it, and I did from time to time. I also did security testing over the years and once you've joined a machine to a Windows domain, it never can be made the same again. Vmware enabled that business without a spare laptop or spending tons of time rebuilding it. I've maintained the license since then, 25ish years. Bought it for the Mac too. I can't think of a worse transition than the one they're doing.

Software, done right, is both extremely hard and expensive. Hardware was cheapened by China/Asia but it is not happening for software (theirs generally sucks and they lack many fundamentals). Europe completely lost the race.

The current breed of managers in the US have decided to fire developers, abuse customers (you have nowhere to go) and burn all the money on AI (they believe it’ll solve all their problems).

Morale will remain low until an alternative spawns. Kinda with electric cars. Europeans, Japanese and Koreans are now forced to up their game and lower their prices.

Agreed. My org can take some of the blame but with our big vendors:

10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)

10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.

Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).

Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company

Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing

A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.

My pet peeve is core-based licensing for products such as database engines. For that matter, any kind of capacity licensing tied to some variant of Moore’s law inevitably results in the vendor holding their product’s face under water as the tide rises around them.

As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.

That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!

Azure offers a new VM series where the max memory limit of SQL Std is exceeded with just four cores (8 vCPUs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

There are VMs available now that have crossed the “kilo core” threshold. You can draw pictures in their task manager by creatively putting load on the processors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!

Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.

Time to learn PostgreSQL, I guess…