If you create truly mediocre software for a vertical market in a mainstream technology like .NET, fill it with buzzwords like "web services", then the truly ignorant will shower you with bags of money. Apparently that's the recipe to becoming a success. Hard to believe isn't it? Well I wish it weren't true but it must be. Otherwise I have no explanation for the project that I'm working on.
Recommendation #1. Make it real ugly.
I commented earlier this year about the ugly UI, and since then things haven't gotten much better as I've started to dig around under the covers. The entire UI is driven via metadata. Nobody actually designs this interface to help the user solve his problem. Hell no! That's way too much work. Instead, tell it there's a new column and it just adds it the the grid. Wow. That's brilliant. Yeah it's ultimately flexible and configurable by every single client but then you end up with one ugly generic UI. Where's the dialogue between designer, developer, and user about what's critical?
Recommendation #2. Use .NET specific types in your Web Services
Because this is largely an integration project we tried to follow the vendor's recommendation to use their "platform-neutral, next-generation, SOA compliant", web services. Well that turned out to be a bust because their crappy implementation simply returns a serialized Microsoft .NET DataSet that no other toolset (including AXIS for Java) seems to be able to understand it. We ended up using a TCP/IP monitor to reverse engineer this abomination just so that we could figure out how to call it. And if you've ever looked at the XML of a serialized dataset you'd know immediately that this isn't something you should be exposing to your clients in the first place. It basically opens the kimono and says "here's my data model". So now there's zero abstraction from the database. If it changes then so does the web service. I can see that being nice and stable. Not!
Recommendation #3. Release often and change your external API.
Trying to write some code on top of something that changes all the time is like building a house on mud. Just yesterday, we discovered that their latest version of the app has a subtle change in the URLs for the web services. Suddenly none of our code worked. (BTW: I argued that we should test this thing before just dumping it on our servers but nobody listened).
Recommendation #4. Make ridiculous claims and milk your clients for consulting fees.
The vendor said it works with Oracle to make the sale but their consultant, who came onsite for a week to troubleshoot the performance problem, made the astounding pronouncement: "it works faster with SQL Server". What? What about the promises you made before and are you sure that'll fix anything? During our load testing we discovered that the CPU utilization on the database server is minimal regardless of database flavor. It's the application server that's pinned! How come they didn't mention that?
Conclusion Make crappy software for a niche market whose users are dumb enough to get dazzled by a flashy demo. Then sell a license for some exorbitant fee and just start milking them with expensive consulting served up by people who don't have a clue what they're talking about. Sure your users and their pathetic IT staff will grow to loathe you, but hey you already have their money and there's always another sucker knocking on your door just dying to buy your "enterprise software".
Or you could just Get Real...
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