Whew, sure kicked off a good foodfight today.

Michael Krigsman says I don’t understand enterprise software.

Nick Carr says Michael Krigsman (the guy above) doesn’t understand enterprise software.

Will the guy who understands enterprise software please stand up and collect your 15 page views? Thank you very much.

🙂

Speaking of which, Ross Mayfield wins the award for sexiest headline of the group for “Enterprise Social Software doesn’t get you laid, it gets you promoted.”

Dennis Howlett tells me to check out Majority Desk. That +is+ pretty sexy.

Vinnie Mirchandani notes “I take the afternoon off to watch some football, and I see what in the NFL they call “swarm defense”. Fellow Irregulars – Michael Krigsman, Dan Farber, Dennis Howlett, Anshu Sharma, Sadagopan, Craig Cmehil – have all jumped in defending enterprise technologies. Just shows you us boring enterprise types have little to do even on Sundays -)”

Anshu Sharma gives us five things that turn CIO’s on. Heh, CIO porn! Who knew?

Tomorrow at about 6 a.m. Pacific Time, Microsoft will have some more to add to the Enterprise Foodfight. I’ll have a video up on Scoble Show.

It’s 2 a.m. or something like that over in Paris and I just got word that Marc Orchant has died.

I can’t make it back for the funeral, Marc wouldn’t have wanted that and would have wanted to be in the front row at LeWeb conference. I can hear his voice right now, he was the kind of guy who’d make sure that he followed through on his promises.

But this news just sucked the oxygen out of me.

He was such a great guy. A real loss for the tech blogging world. Hell, just a real loss for the world.

Anyway, I’ll work with Loic Le Meur (the guy who is running the LeWeb conference, which starts Tuesday in Paris and has more than 1,700 attendees), to see if we can find some good way to honor Marc. Knowing Marc his funeral will be streamed live on the Internet. That is, afterall, the way he’d have wanted it to be.

The last time I saw Marc and Sue together was in August when Buzz Bruggeman took us out for dinner. Both were happy and in their element: having good times.

I can’t believe he’s gone. He died way too young but he did live well and, in doing so, enriched all of our lives.

Bill Gates seems to bemoan the fact that enterprise software isn’t covered by blogs and journalists. Instead, he points out, that we like talking about consumer software.

It’s a good point, especially since business software like that from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc makes a TON of money.

So, why is it so?

Well, how many people in the world actually buy business software? For instance, back when I worked at NEC, a company that had more than 100,000 employees back then (more employees than work at Microsoft, actually) we used SAP. But I didn’t have any say in that matter. Some CIO somewhere else made that decision and forced us all to use SAP. That doesn’t exactly make us warm and fuzzy about the computer sitting in front of us on the desk.

But that doesn’t really explain it totally.

Instead, let’s look at the business of journalism or even of blogging. We’re paid to deliver page views. Advertisers call it “CPM” (cost per thousand viewers). Now, what’s going to get more of you interested? Consumer software that you actually have a role in adopting or purchasing or enterprise software where some CIO somewhere else in your organization decides on? I know that when I talk about enterprise software the numbers of viewers just don’t show up. So, tech bloggers quickly learn that if they talk about enterprise software they aren’t going to get many advertising impressions.

There are a variety of CIO blogs, though, I wonder which one is the best one?

Don’t feel too sad for Gates, though. He’s laughing all the way to the bank. Turns out those CIOs buy a lot of software.

Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?

I wonder what the Enterprise Irregulars think about this? (They are a group of bloggers who cover business software).