Let’s get one thing clear. None of us are perfect. All of us tend to make common mistakes. This is part of the human condition. Nobody is immune to this. If you’re a human being, chances are you are going to make mistakes. After all, there is an old saying “To err is human”. Focus on that. Wrap your mind around that. Your tendency to make mistakes means you are part of this giant club called humanity. Understanding that you tend to make mistakes is one thing. Hanging on to that tendency is another. Now that you’re clear on the concept that you tend to make errors, you have to work around it. This article steps you through the process of identifying common software selection mistakes and how to avoid them.

Going By Brand
Microsoft is a multibillion dollar company not because it’s the best manufacturer in the world. Far from it. A lot of its products are second rate at best. The main reason why it’s number one is because of this thing called network effect. Since it has near monopoly on operating systems, it builds secondary products based on that operating system. The thinking is that since it contains the operating system, there’s such a tight fit between these secondary software products and their operating system that these secondary products are best adapted to the Windows environment. This is the big concept Microsoft’s billions are based on.
If you have used third-party software in the past, you know that this is a flat-out lie. This is too much of an assumption to make. While it’s true that Microsoft does have a chokehold on the operating systems of the world whether we like it or not, it doesn’t necessarily logically follow that the third-party software are somehow someway defective coming out of the gate. In fact, there are many different niches in the software field like accounting where third-party brands outperform and blow away Microsoft products all day every day.
I’m not talking about spreadsheets. I’m talking specialized accounting software and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t go by brand. If you just got taken in by the fact that a big manufacturer or a well-known brand produced a software then chances are quite high that you are settling for second-rate software.

Focus on What You Need
One of the biggest curses of modern day software is the concept of bloat. Seriously. You’ve heard of the phrase “bell and whistles”. Software bloat takes that concept to a ridiculous level. They pack so many unwanted and unnecessary and even experimental features on a piece of software so as to justify why they’re charging more money for that software. Alternatively, they do this to justify a new version which they can charge money for.
The reality is that if you buy software that does the job the right way the first time around regardless of how many times Windows updates or regardless of how many times that software updates, it would still be able to do the job. Versioning is one of the biggest lies in the software industry that people eat up all day every day. Don’t fall for it. Focus on whether the software that you’re buying does the job even if it’s an older version and you paid very little money for it. If it is up to the job, stick to it.

Don’t Be Automatically Suspicious of Open- Source
One of the biggest lies being peddled by big software companies involves open-source. A lot of consumers are under the impression that open-source software is necessarily inferior. After all, it’s free. After all, it isn’t produced by the big-name brands. How good could it be? You’d be surprised as to how good WordPress, OpenOffice and other open-source software are. They are good because they have so many users distributed throughout the world that whatever defects they may have or security holes are quickly patched up.
You can rely on the power of an open-source software’s distributed global network of users to get to the problem quickly. So, don’t think that just because a software option is free and open-source, they necessarily must be a pile of crap. In many cases, open-source software outperforms paid software. That’s right. Software that you paid hundreds of dollars for can’t even measure up to something that is completely and totally free. How crazy is that?