A discussion about the software industry and their coders

This post continues from my previous "primer" post on product management -- Product Management of Enterprise V/s Desktop Products. We will try to understand the practical differences in Product Management for Desktop & Enterprise software by examining the differences in the problems these software products solve for end users.

Solving problems of Individual Customers -- Desktop/Consumer Software

Desktop  and Consumer Software products focus on solving the problems of users as "individuals" or at the maximum as small "teams" with a specific goal like productivity, email, word processing, antivirus protection, financial recording, presentation design etc.

Solving Aggregate problems of an Organization or a Department -- Enterprise Software

Enterprise Software focuses on solving aggregate problems at the organizational or departmental level. Very often companies that provide desktop software -- build an "enterprise version" of the desktop software. This usually happens when several individuals use a desktop software and the organization wants these individuals to connect and collaborate besides allowing the organization to measure and track such collaborative effort. Server software from Quark like Quark Publishing System (QPS) and Adobe Systems (ADBE) like InDesign Server CS 2 is an example of this evolution from desktop to enterprise level.

Login & Security Mechanism?

It can happen that multiple individual users can collaboratively use desktop software. But the software would still be focused on deliverables of a group of individuals. There would be no login-password or security mechanisms required of Desktop Software -- individuals will just create and edit files and pass them around via email. Thus if a desktop software is used in small/medium/large businessess -- still the "workflow" (users-working-collaboratively) issues for Desktop software products tend to be workgroups of limited sizes (typically between 5 to 50, mostly less than 100).

Consumer software, especially focuses on stand-alone users either working by themselves (downloading photos from mobile phone) or interacting directly on a 1-1 basis -- e.g. web chat.

Summary

These are defining differences between Desktop/Consumer Software and Enterprise Software. Enterprise Software products typically focus on specific workflows that affect the aggregate working or operations or function / department of a department/function (Marketing), multiple departments (Production and Inventory) or the entire organization. The focus is not on the deliverables of an indvidual user but on the deliverables/aggregate workings of a function, operation or department. SAP (SAP) and Oracle (ORCL) are examples of Enterprise Software providers.

Read More Daniel Shefer's Software Product Management & Product Marketing Website.

Continued... Customer Differences in Desktop & Enterprise Software