Acquisition

For many purchasers of software solutions, transparency of the software they acquire is a non-issue. They never expose themselves to source code or documentation, be it because they accepted the software under inappropriate terms and conditions, or because they think that worrying about the programming level of the software renders no business advantage to them.

Such clients are the perfect „unaware customer“. When the software solution they acquired starts behaving oddly, they will be forced to start the entire procedure of solution-acquisition anew. They even allow themselves to believe that this was a normal way of software solutions to behave. They will be told that what happens was a „license renewal“ or that the software they are using is not really a computer program in the technical sense but a „service“ that is subject to an „agreement“.

In short, purchasers of intransparent software waste money in the long run, and as soon as the IT budget is exceeded this will become apparent. This is usually when things start getting a bit more dramatic than a mere „renegiotiation of software licensing“.

Even worse, such practises of software acquisition equip sufficiently malign vendors with abundant, disproportionate financial backing, allowing them to manipulate entire industries of software production into a system that is not even capable of providing software in any other way but the irresponsible, fraudulent way of keeping relevant parts of a solution away from the customer as a permanent grant to strip off more and more money for a solution that already has been paid for a long time ago.

Intransparent software has the qualities of a throwaway product: All economic and technical reason is thrown overboard if software purchasers do not care about long-term quality but only are interested in immediate results, no matter how short-lived those may be. When resources dwindle and business falters, someone will have to pay the hidden cost.