There's a great article by Jeff Yang @ SFGate on How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan. While the core part of the article itself is interesting, I found a small segment of the article even more insightful.

On page 3 of the article, Yang quotes Andrew Lih, a USC Annenberg professor and its director of new media, on why Sony has stumbled of late:

Consumer electronics are so complex today that they can't simply be a checklist of features...

The brands that curate their products well, with thoughtfulness and consideration for the customer, end up the winners. And Sony has hardly done that.

The quote is especially interesting in that it's not just related to consumer electronics. If you substituted 'consumer electronics' for 'enterprise software' and inserted any enterprise software vendor in place of 'Sony', you probably wouldn't be far from the truth.

In many ways, the quote sums up how I feel about many of the bigger players in the business intelligence market. It seems to me that the vendors that do have the nicest set of curated features are the upstarts, like Tableau and Bona Vista Systems. Their feature sets may not be as sweeping as their larger competitors, but they are extremely good at the features they do have.

Each year, when one of the major BI vendors has their major announcement of a release, it usually has more to do with the announcement of more checklist items than the improvement of their already flawed features. While I do understand the vicious cycle of uninformed technology purchasers, focusing on quantity over quality strikes me as a short term strategy. Developing lock-in through the fear of losing sunk costs is not what I would consider to be the way to go, especially when open source vendors are just starting to disrupt the marketplace.