Sunil Dixit
Jul 27, 2017 · 1 min read

Great article Rahul — nice breakdown of the varying software development and deployment approaches of the two kinds of companies.

My 2 cents: I think that the applications market will stay with the enterprise players for a couple of reasons, one of which you mentioned — which is the fragmentation and size of the market. The other reason is the nature of the software itself — which is inherently tied and dependent on the business processes (SFA, SCM, HCM etc.). I am not sure if consumer companies have the strong desire or DNA to figure out these processes, and then fit the software to support their various forms, shapes and flavors. At the higher end of the market — these processes can especially become customer specific, and of course industry specific. However, these processes itself make enterprise software very hard to mimic for new comers, and sticky with the customers. Technology infrastructure, on the other hand, is less differentiated in my opinion, and comparatively more replaceable. Thus, that market will get taken over by at-scale companies like Google, MSFT and AWS.

While productivity applications are fair game to both kinds of companies, there is very little customization or “fit-to-process”. In other words, one app will fit all users (for the most part). For that reason, I think the consumer companies will eventually dominate productivity applications.

    Sunil Dixit

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    In pursuit of smarter products through technology, design and analytics. Bullish on Numerify, Silicon Valley & America! All tweets are my opinions only