“The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is
broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn’t
address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information
officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.“”The business models between customer and vendors are
fundamentally broken,” said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at
the Interop conference in New York. “Vendors have to guess at what
[customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want
and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer
is looking for.”“Of course, being an executive of an open-source software
company, Whitehurst would naturally be critical of the standard
model of software sales, and he has spoken critically of the model
in the past. In his presentation at Interop, however, he also
discussed how cloud computing could offer a break from this
routine, depending on how it is implemented.”