It has become more and more clear to me that the biggest problem enterprises face in their IT selection is the software vendors, who try to sell monolithic “solution” that almost never delivers as promised. There is an inherent conflict of interest. Regardless of the advantages of a closely controlled environment, it’s almost bound to go wrong, because there is so much incentive to make it go wrong. So what’s the solution? Loosely coupled services that work well and are adopted bottom up can take care of a large part of an enterprise’s software needs. For the bits that do need to be closely controlled, I guess we’ll need the SAP’s of this world for this for a while longer.
(Damn these cryptic posts with no examples! Oh well, no time.)