The Software Survey Results

Just polishing the report from the software survey. The data is pretty interesting, and really does emphasize the need for something like Idealware. There’s a ton of money and time being spent – easily into the hundreds of millions of dollars worth, potentially a billion dollars or more across the sector. But the results of this spending aren’t good – only 58% agreed that they had in general the right tools to do their jobs, only 49% that they were even aware of most of the tools that were likely to be helpful. And this from primarily N-TEN folks – presumably more tech savvy than most.

One of the key questions to me in the survey was what people would be willing to pay for something like this. 52% were willing to pay something, which I’m actually heartened by. And it seems like for a lot of those who said they weren’t likely to pay anything, it was because they were suspicious of a nonprofit charging – hopefully some could be swayed with useful reviews from a trusted organization. Though the overall cheapness of the nonprofit sector certainly shouldn’t be discounted – information will have to be extremely useful in the immediate short term for people to pay.