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Users

Users, especially those trying to work together in businesses and other enterprises, are becoming more sophisticated and demanding, and they're not happy. Often they must make do with applications that don't quite fit their needs. Standard accounting packages are fine if you run a standard business, but accounting for many businesses requires additional categories and relationships that just can't be anticipated by large software companies targeting mass markets. The same thing holds true in every software category. Software companies keep adding complicated features to their big applications, but customizing for specialized purposes is still very difficult.

Even if they don't use all the extra features, customers pay for all those extra bytes. The vast majority of commercial software shipments go to existing users who are less and less pleased with what they get. Well-established applications get larger and more difficult to use, and applications that expand the use of computers into new areas such as collaboration are rare. As a result, the software market for both individual users and business customers is becoming a replacement market with little growth.

Applications still don't work together as well as they should. Even copying and pasting can't always be relied on. If you're working with text, you will probably get the ASCII characters, but not always the fonts, styles, and sizes, and hardly ever the tabs, margins, and line spacing. If you're working with graphics, you'll probably get the lines and rectangles, but not always the colors or more complex curves, and rarely the alignment, grouping, or snap-to-grid information. Considering the difficulties at this trivial level of cooperation, it's not surprising that distributed applications used with diverse databases and hardware platforms over large networks have severe limitations from the point of view of both users and system administrators.

For example, programs written for traditional operating systems can implement limited collaboration capabilities, but they must use a complex conversion process that involves sending millions of bits over a single connection with one other computer. Two users in different locations can view and annotate a document using special tools, but only one can make real-time changes to the document itself, and there is little or no support for collaboration among more than two users.

New technologies like OLE promise to improve interapplication communication, but their additional capabilities cost the developer more time writing code. OLE is difficult to program and therefore works best when a given company controls the applications that are trying to communicate. As a result, OLE is best suited for large software companies that sell several major horizontal high-volume applications, especially highly integrated application suites. It tends to hurt small companies doing more specialized applications for smaller markets, because they must support this expensive technology to remain competitive, without reaping the benefits across several successful applications.

This situation directly affects the options available to users: if you want your applications to work smoothly together, you have to buy a standard package that addresses some, but not all, of your needs. If you take a chance on more specialized applications, they may not work together as reliably.

Like their counterparts in corporate software development, users in large organizations are especially vulnerable to the limitations of the current generation of applications. Multiuser collaboration across corporate networks faces all kinds of obstacles, including incompatible platforms, multiple email systems, multiple network protocols, and security problems. Corporate users working together over a network must deal with a tangle of rules and procedures and long lists of names--all things that computers are supposed to be good at but aren't.


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Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Copyright©1995 by Sean Cotter and Taligent,Inc. All rights reserved.