An experienced firm that knows your business and knows what it takes to implement software will do a better job with an inferior product than a vendor with a great product but no know-how. Columnist Rob Enderle says it's high time to accept that.
Over the last year, the IT events I've attended have increasingly showcased a trend among users to bypass IT departments and go directly to online services like those supplied by Google and Amazon. BMC even created a unique program, called Cloud Boot Camp, which basically serves as a marriage counselling service that helps IT and line executives reconcile so that policies aren't broken and IT isn't made redundant.
I recently read an interesting post evidently written by a Microsoft employee who had left that company to join Google and then returned after finding the grass wasn't so green on the other side of the fence. Google is well-recognized for providing one of the best working environments in the world, but like many companies that have been similarly revered, they appear to be systematically killing it, according to this post. This all sounded very familiar, and in Google I see the repeat of catastrophic mistakes made by IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Sun and Yahoo.
Having worked for large and small companies, I have seen massive layoffs and reorganizations, and watched painfully as entitlements were stripped in order to feather executive bonuses. In the end, there are companies that value employees and those that don't, and, given a choice, my recommendation based on a lifetime of experience is to find a path to work for the former.