as an app not sure, but as a system, I would call it government
Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
71–80 of 107 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#72Wouldn't anyone on this site, if they had the knowledge of that, make a competing product? Or perhaps some of us are? That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation.
Not necessarily... If I said MS-Word, would you decide to go out and create a word processor, probably not since the market is pretty much a done deal.
I get what you mean, but why not? Having a well-established, dominant player doesn't mean there's no opportunity to make a living solving similar problems. "Word" is a huge target, it covers so many use cases that it's possible to focus on a few of them and provide a tailored solution that enough people find valuable. This was the status quo when Google Docs was being developed as well, and OpenOffice for that matter.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#73Pretty much any financial or HR app: QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, ADP...
Why is it like that? Are people not interested to design better products or it’s the “don’t fix what’s not broken” attitude?
The sale for this kind of software is made at a level that has no idea what the actual product/deliverable does. With predictable results.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem with ticketing and document authoring platforms are that they are arbitrarily complex. I have some sympathy for Atlassian on managing the complexity of these things. Many things are arbitrarily complex. But Atlassian constantly gives items of differing importance the same level of attention, in a shotgun blast of UI.
And just when you think you've got it sorted out, they do a major redesign and screw up your workflow (not the ticket flow, your personal one). +1000 to JIRA as a response to this. I'd probably support confluence here too but every company y I've worked with killed it one the WYSWYG editor became mandatory and all of engineering refused to use it.
There's a plain text option in the Jira I use, that will show formatting in the usual forms, like *, _, etc. I also refuse to use the WYSIWYG editor since it's a pain.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#75Lotus Notes
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#76Netsuite comes to mind. Enterprise software. Charges hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It tries to be everything to everyone which makes it really slow. And the menu has 500 options so it's hard to navigate.
For what it's worth, it has made me say "Wow, that is really cool and useful!" more than a few times but also very often "WTF! Why does this take so long! This is a common operation!" and "Why is this so unnecessarily complex!"
The API is SOAP and routinely takes 5+ seconds to do a common operation like "Create order" - and ad hoc searches can take minutes.
Business people like it because it gets them every critical piece of business operations data they need at their finger tips but also hate it because of the hundreds of thousands they ultimately pay consultants to deal with the complexity.
Runner up: Jira
A lot of people say Wordpress but I think a lot of the Wordpress UI is good design. Which is part of why it's popular. It is just really slow (unless you spend a LOT of time optimizing). So Netsuite wins for being both slow AND poorly designed.
Edit: That said I can't say that I wouldn't recommend Netsuite. If you are a multi-national corporation (or even a large domestic one) and sell or manufacture a physical product, and have the time and money to pay the licensing fees and the consultants it does everything you could possibly want and more. If someone asked me for a recommendation I'd say: "It's great but don't expect it to be perfect day one. It will take a year with possibly multiple full time consultants to get everything where you want it to be."
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#77Wouldn't anyone on this site, if they had the knowledge of that, make a competing product? Or perhaps some of us are? That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation.
> That's a fairly lazy question, and I cannot see how it would really start a good conversation. And yet, 25 minutes and 42 comments.
In my defence when I replied there were 3 throwaway replies and nothing through provoking.
I do stand corrected though :-)
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#78Outlook.com/OneDrive web
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#79Visio
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
And just when you think you've got it sorted out, they do a major redesign and screw up your workflow (not the ticket flow, your personal one). +1000 to JIRA as a response to this. I'd probably support confluence here too but every company y I've worked with killed it one the WYSWYG editor became mandatory and all of engineering refused to use it.
There's a plain text option in the Jira I use, that will show formatting in the usual forms, like *, _, etc. I also refuse to use the WYSIWYG editor since it's a pain.
Confluence has no plain text editor, and the WYSIWYG one is horribly broken.
It's a pain to use.