Blogging Roller

I'm going to go out on a limb here and post for all to see my recently developed theory of commercial software quality and value vs. software price. Three disclaimers are necessary. First: I am a heads-down, propeller-head, bits-and-bytes, grunt-coder, who reads Slashdot for news - so what do I know. Second: my theory is based mostly on hearsay and second hand knowledge. And third: I believe that pretty much all software sucks. So, saying that PhotoShop or Dreamweaver "rocks" is somewhat disingenuous on my part. Anyhow, please bear with me and take a look at my whiteboard:

The basic idea here is that software quality and value goes up as the price of one installation of the software goes up until you get to around the $3K to $5K price range. After that, quality and value start to drop off and around $20K to $50K they fall right off the cliff.

From my graph you can see that I consider consumer software like Quicken, Office, and PhotoShop to be pretty good stuff, with good value and few major flaws. You can continue to get better quality and value as you get into the AutoCAD and Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise price levels, but after that quality and value start to drop off. Once you get up around the $100K to $1M level you are in the painful world of systems integrators, e-Commerce consultants, and enterprise software. At this level, usability features that you take for granted in consumer products are often missing, installation instructions can run into the hundreds of pages, and teams of consultants are needed to do almost any customizations.

As a J2EE developer who works in the field of enterprise software, I want to do better - I want to learn how to make software suck less. But, enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think? Is there any truth to my theory? Am I totally wrong about this? Is there any insight here, or am I just being petty? Does the ROI of the big expensive enterprise software make it the most valuable of all, quality be damned?