Nate Swanson didn’t have a whole lot of good to say today about Kenexa, believing that “the company continues to move further down a failing software strategy.”

Swanson says Kenexa blames, among other things, the strengthening U.S. dollar for its lowered projections, but he says that “we believe Kenexa’s real issue is that it’s trying to do too much. We believe this is creating confusion with customers and field sales reps, negatively impacting customer support, stifling innovation, and in general, making it very difficult to execute consistently in a more difficult competitive environment.”

He adds: “BrassRing will continue to run as a standalone product. We believe this decision will diminish innovation, placing Kenexa further behind best-of-breed vendor Taleo, and ultimately result in a product portfolio that is increasingly expensive to service and support.”

Meanwhile, Swanson issued a positive report on StepStone, saying, “We believe StepStone is uniquely positioned within the emerging human capital management market. In many ways, the company, in our view, has done what Monster should have done several years ago — combine a low-cost customer acquisition tool in its job board properties with a suite of high-value human capital management applications. While cross-selling between the company’s two businesses has only just begun, we believe there is a significant potential opportunity to do so, especially selling high-value, recurring revenue human capital management applications that tend to be stickier.”