Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Single vendor hell - aka "one neck to choke"

A colleague lamented the other day about the uber consolidation that is going on with the largest of IT vendors (and has been for some time).

I can't help but think its the "IT consumers" who share part of the blame for this: For years, in the late 90's and early 2000's people wanted to have less vendors to deal with, less overlap and "one neck to choke", well, guess what:

It has kind of happened. But this is a terrible terrible thing for IT consumers: who on earth would think that it could work out well for "IT consumers" to have one vendor providing the full stack? Its a testament to the genius of the vendors that the convinced people that a single vendor providing all parts of "the stack" was a good idea and a worthy goal.

Choice is a tiring thing to have, but its also a good thing, like exercise.

Be careful what you wish for - it might just come true. So IT consumers will now need to be doubly diligent to have a few suppliers in the mix lest the obvious happen to them.