{"id":92,"date":"2005-09-02T12:59:39","date_gmt":"2005-09-02T18:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=92"},"modified":"2005-09-02T12:59:39","modified_gmt":"2005-09-02T18:59:39","slug":"thanks_but_no_t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=92","title":{"rendered":"Thanks but no thanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Customer reception to our new Reynolds Generations Series solutions, which we introduced in mid-January, is strong.” So said<\/a> Buzz Waterhouse, CEO of Reynolds & Reynolds, the biggest supplier of software to auto dealers, back in April 2002. Based on Microsoft’s .NET platform, the new software suite was supposed to revolutionize the way dealers manage their business. The “breakthrough solution” was even featured in a glowing Microsoft case study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Too bad it didn’t sell. By the end of 2004, Waterhouse was out the door, as Reynolds & Reynolds reported disappointing results. This summer, new CEO Finbarr O’Neill pulled the plug<\/a> on Reynolds Generation Series, announcing that the company would take a writeoff of $67 million. There were also warnings of “additional costs” down the road. According to Automotive News<\/a>, the software was discontinued “because of poor sales, high implementation and training costs and substantial changes that were required in dealership processes to make it work.” In other words, it wasn’t worth the hassle.<\/p>\n

It’s just another small sign of software fatigue. At some point, companies begin to see declining returns from additional investments in new software, and they decide their existing systems are good enough. For auto dealers, that point seems to be now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fancy new software suite goes down the tubes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}