The Business Cat Brief
Let's make OLAP into NOLAP!
The Complaint
Running your business is hard, making reports shouldn't be. Yet, it looks like an entire industry is stacked against that one goal. The business reporting industry is one of buzzwordiest, consultatious sectors in the software market. For the priviledge of seeing how many widgets you've sold, you will pay a for a lifetime. The culture of consultantware thrives on this model. Its really quite simple to execute:
- Identify a sector of business that is critical but possibly mundane,
- Design software that is infinitely configurable,
- Spend a lot of time marketing this software as free,
- Send in sales consultants to show a fancy demo,
- Actually write the software as quickly as possible,
- Rake in the cash with support contracts and enterprise licensing.
You see, by spending development money on marketing and then offering consulting and support, a company can appear quite competent when, in fact, their core product is a turd. The true genius of this trick is to convince the business owners said product is working splendidly and keep the workers who actually deal with it quiet about the truth; FUD works best there.
Of course, there really doesn't exist an alternative. You might really wonder why no one has started a completely open source project to fill this need? The truth is that some have, and some are quite good, but also quite complicated. The current open source alternative is attempting to directly compete with the big boys. The problem is that their projects are flawed by the same design philosophy. I want a reset.