[Quote:]

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.

This is one of the reasons we think enterprise is a dirty word. It’s also why it’s an absolute pleasure to design products for what we call the Fortune 5,000,000.

The Fortune 5,000,000 are the the small businesses, the side-businessess, the freelancers. The people who buy our products are the people who use our products. If they don’t get value on the financial side and the productivity side they don’t stick around.

We have to make the money happy and the people happy. In our market they’re the same person. In the enterprise market they are often different people in different departments in different buildings who sit at different tables during lunch.

In the world of small business software the product — not the salesperson — does the talking. There’s no camouflaging value when the buyer is the user.

Hear hear.

(and some excellent comments in this article as well)