Michael Thomas complains in Salon today that the big problem for IT companies isn’t the accounting, it’s the products, which often don’t work. This certainly jibes with my experience. I’ve found that the more a software product costs, the less likely it is to work properly, and the harder it will be to implement. In the Java world, for example, I’ve used Tomcat, Resin (a cheap servlet engine from Caucho Software), and BEA WebLogic. Of the three, WebLogic was the hardest to get up and running, the hardest to deal with on a day to day basis, and was the most expensive by an almost unbelievable factor. I’d be willing to accept that BEA offers a lot of features that the others don’t, but frankly I’ve never run into limitations in the other products that sent me looking for more.