Loosely Coupled sees a disruption in Siebel's future (and in may other futures by the way:

The really bad news for Siebel %u2014 along with Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and every other packaged enterprise applications vendor %u2014 is that people don't want to buy software at all. They don't even want to pay for it %u2014 and with hosted services, they don't have to.

It's tough to manage, tough to maintain, tough to install, and expensive to boot, so who can blame them. The alternative to software being proposed is still being fleshed out, but the core of the new world of software is being fleshed out:

• Don't sell the software - sell the service it enables instead. People want to accomplish goals. If they don't need the hassle of an IT department to accomplish them that's just better.


• Commoditize the interface and price the data instead. SOAP, XML and other inventions along with decent open source tools to leverage these technologies is cutting down the cost of the software/program logic itself. It's the data provided or managed by a service you pay for.


• Make sure your solution isn't just 'remote software'. If you're actually selling remote interactive interfaces to essentially the same product you used to distribute locally, you're doing it wrong, says Loosely Coupled. This is one of the murkier theses. Jim Gray of Micorsoft research has the numbers on distributed computing, and I'm not sure they favour the argument.