But now many CIOs are beginning to realize that the root of the problem may lie in the economics of the industry. Vendors generate most of their revenues through perpetual licensing agreements, which force CIOs to pay up front for an application. In return, CIOs own the software and the right to use it "in perpetuity." The problem with this model is that in reality, CIOs are lucky if they can get three years out of a product before vendors release entirely new versions of their software. Vendors further pressure CIOs to buy those new releases by threatening to stop supporting previous releases?a tactic they often take both to cut their tech support costs and to get CIOs to pay again and again for what is essentially the same product.

Another problem with the perpetual model is that CIOs have to fork over an additional 15 percent to 20 percent of what they paid for the software in annual maintenance fees to cover product updates and tech support, according to Chuck Phillips, managing director and software industry analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. If CIOs want to receive upgrades, patches and access to tech support?as inadequate as it can sometimes be?they have to pay the yearly maintenance fee. Software companies earn a significant amount of cash from these fees. So it’s in the manufacturer’s best interest, at least financially, to make products that need maintenance and that have to be continually improved with successive updates, patches and versions that CIOs pay for up front. In sum, bad software works for the vendors.

There are, of course, other reasons for all the bugs. IT professionals point to a whole litany of causes: bloatware, with all its useless bells and whistles; programmers working in isolation, blissfully ignorant of how people will ultimately be using their software on a daily basis; reusable components that may already contain bugs; an absence of agreed upon professional standards; and developers who take shortcuts to meet deadlines during development.

But a large part of the story may indeed be the way vendors sell software. CIOs are finally waking up to this, and a growing number are demanding that vendors change their business models. A council of IT leaders from a dozen heavy-hitter enterprises convened in August under the auspices of Boston-based analyst company AMR Research, intent on pushing for software industry reform. The group issued a peaceful statement of its desire to "work with" software companies for improvements in quality, delivery reliability and versioning. However, with big names like Becton Dickinson, Boeing, Cabot, General Dynamics and Kraft on the roster, the council has enough weight to change "work with" to "lean on."