Disclaimer 1: I will talk about the Russian market of commercial development in the segment of small and medium-sized businesses. With other markets, a slightly different situation.
Disclaimer 2: I am not an employee of 1C-Bitrix and do not write on it. But I wrote on Bitrix, and managed the studio, and was the customer of the site on Bitrix.
Once the only right decision
The Bitrix sales system was built very correctly from a business point of view: 1C-Bitrix considers its customers to be final customers: owners of shops, factories and ships, who order their solutions in agencies or directly from the platform.
I think that at the time when Bitrix was born, this approach was the only right strategy: the market was fragmented, there were a lot of agencies and freelancers, various self-written CMSs, and to promote one thing only was to prove to agencies that you were the best. But then the agencies didn’t need it at all, I’m writing as the person who at that moment was in charge of the studio. Of the competitors, there was only NetCat, which never set out to turn the market around, but in fact probably just didn’t have such funds for advertising.
As a result, the right decision was made: to invest money not in persuading agencies, but in advertising for end customers. And it worked, customers came to the agency and ordered the solution “from the TV”, about which smart uncle Sergei Ryzhikov said that this is the best thing on the market.
And you know, it happened. One, two, then more and more customers began to come not just for the site, but for the solution on the Bitrix platform, and now the agency heads have to think, look for a specialist or give up market share. And Bitrix’s marketing was so good that many agencies bent down, not keeping up with the market’s maneuver.
Parties to the conflict
It seems to me that the problem currently has 4 sides, let's look at this love square:
1C-Bitrix
On the one hand, 1C-Bitrix has been successfully promoting its content management system on the market for a very long time. During this time, cms has turned into a whole platform, the individual parts of which are successfully integrated into each other.
The company spends a lot of money on promoting the platform among decision-makers, promises a quick start, a lot of generally beautiful design templates and trouble-free work in the future due to updates and a large number of certified support agencies throughout the country.
Developers
On the other hand, as ardent opponents of the system, there are developers who have to make changes to Bitrix solutions.
Developers in the early stages of their careers willingly take on any work on any platform. With experience comes the ability to choose tools to solve your problems, and the ability to reasonably defend your choice.
Therefore, experienced developers who have tried various languages ​​and tools do not really (very much) favor the internal structure of the platform and the system modules, the flexibility and visibility of its work. This is especially noticeable to developers writing on modern php frameworks Symfony, Laravel, Yii and Zend. Here I will not even go into details so as not to raise dust, the article is not about that.
Customers
The end users of the system are customers, those who order website development on Bitrix from agencies or make it by their developers. Those who pay for the entire banquet. Such customers at the start are promised a turnkey solution that will work without problems and will bring only happiness, joy and pink unicorns.
In practice, customers soon enough plunge into the wonderful world of Bitrix service, when a little refinement can be done long and expensive, and they are horrified that a turnkey solution for several thousand rubles requires hundreds and hundreds of thousands to maintain and develop.
Agencies
In the most uncomfortable position in this Kama Sutra, Internet agencies and development studios have been put up for sale and then develop solutions based on 1C-Bitrix.
Agencies are forced to take junior-middle level developers who agree to go to any project and any cms. This option is fraught with prolonged periods and the presence of errors as a result of work. This option usually upsets the end customers.
Or, agencies are forced to buy senior developers on the market at inflated rates. And these still need to be found and talked about, because experienced developers know their worth and will not go to any project. Even if the parties agree, the bid of such a developer will result in a large budget for the client, and this option usually also upsets the end customers.
In addition, I often observed a situation where agencies and at inflated prices do not find the right developers, try to raise their own, but for some reason they also run away over time. And as a result, again lack of personnel, overload and failure to meet deadlines. This option ... - Yes, again upsets customers.
As a result, clients who are still paying for the whole clearing for which the agency is trying, with shouts and groans, are forced to change the agency once every N months in the hope of finding something better. But they go in a vicious circle.
What did it spill
Currently, the company profits from cms in a sufficient proportion from agencies that sell and develop working solutions. Agencies here earn on agent discounts and on their additional services.
But this is bad luck: the interests of agencies are put in a lower priority for the company than the interests of end customers. In turn, the interests of programmers, employees of these agencies, are almost inaudible.
Of course, one has to hear customer feedback that Bitrix support is expensive, long and painful, but it can easily be attributed to the unqualified nature of the intermediary link - the agency. After all, the way it is, keeping professionals there is quite difficult in terms of the price of the final product.
It turns out that companies that make money on Bitrix solutions, which should be ambassadors of this platform “last mile”, suffer the most.
All are silent
What is the essence of the problem - we got to the bottom, agencies are put in the position of the compass, but they don’t have much choice, they balance between market demand and the price of a good programmer.
Competent agencies would be ready to offer something else, but now the market does not need it. Remember, before there were a lot of cms at the studios and no one wanted Bitrix? Now, on the contrary, clients are not aware of the availability of alternatives, and the studios have essentially nothing to offer, there are no sufficiently large ready-made solutions with a well-known name, such that it would be worth saying “We suggest using ______”, and there would be no questions.
And if suddenly what agency begins to move towards alternative solutions, he already has to prove to the client why it doesn’t offer like everyone else, but something else, some kind of Symfony or God forbid the unknown Laravel.
Alternatives
Is it possible to build a solution that will be similar in functionality to Bitrix, will work no worse and will be based on something good, good, not causing skin itching among developers?
Yes you can. Actually, the same solutions for themselves are made by large platforms that can afford to hire a development staff or a third-party team and create a solution either in .Net / Java, or by taking Symfony, Laravel, Yii or Zend as the basis (underline as necessary).
However, it’s not enough to create a working solution, you still need to adapt it for customization, write documentation, wrap it in a beautiful product, highlight competitive advantages compared to the leader, and then just advertise on the scale of 1C-Bitrix.
Is it easy? Not at all. So the price of such a solution is very different. That is why we in this article do not take into account large business, there are smart guys who have the resources to choose other solutions.
So is it worth blaming 1C-Bitrix
The company at one time made a huge breakthrough, turned the industry upside down and saved us from self-made holey CMS. Invested a lot of money in it. Now it is perhaps a monopolist, and deservedly rests on its laurels.
How it all ends - wait and see. Will the Bitrix platform suffer the fate of Internet Explorer or will the company manage to adjust? I don’t know what will happen earlier: there will be some noticeable competitor to the platform, or at last the market of Internet sites will finally collapse and everything will go to social networks and instant messengers. I put on the last.
So far, as befits a monopolist, the company is not very keen to change something, to run somewhere headlong, to use some new fashionable standards. This is her role now.
The role of the community is to encourage the monopolist to talk about problems. Only a large commercial structure understands the language of competition with the young, ambitious and fearless much better.