Don McLean sang that long ago in Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie. For me, though, it refers to the day in the 1990′s when I gave up buying music. I stopped because of how painful the music companies made the experience. It was all about protecting their interests and not at all about the consumer. I wasn’t a fan of the form factor – discs in flimsy plastic cases with small print. They looked nearly identical so it was hard to find the right one.  The last straw was what a pain they were to open. I needed something sharp to open the plastic wrap, and then there was that seal that you had to remove to open the case. The purpose was to prevent theft and resale. Every time I opened one I felt annoyed at the lack of trust and consideration it showed.

So no more buying music for me. Back to radio. As always, there was too much schlock on the commercial airwaves, foisted on us by companies whose interests diverge from listeners. So I switched to college radio. (I like WMBR and WZBC, which are about as far away from commercial as you can get.) I enjoyed that for a few years, but started to miss the best of popular music.

Then iTunes and iPods came along and I tried buying music again, but I still found the experience painful. It took way too much time to manage all of my music and over the years iTunes became bloated, buggy and slow. In the past few months with the maturing of Pandora, Spotify and Mog (my current favorite), it is getting easy to find, download and listen to music. I listen much more, and appreciate getting connected to music in a new and better way. All cloud-based content, and downloadable for off-line listening. And I expect that the experience (searching and organizing, for example) will continue to improve.

In the world of IT, on the other hand, when the software experience is painful, users don’t have such a choice. IT gets bigger and more complex every year. Organizations can’t stop using technology and services. Users and administrators need software to manage that complexity and get their daily jobs done. If the software is awful, they often have to keep suffering until they find something better. IT users are too often stuck with the best of the bad choices.

It is our job to make software that breaks out of this morass, this world of sub-par IT software. We exist to produce software that solves important, complex IT problems with simple efficiency. Ipswitch has grown for each of our 21 years because we tend to be better at this than our competitors. We aspire to be more than that as our products address larger and more varied IT challenges. We aspire to provide a compelling user experience in all that we do.