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Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#91

Post by ac29 »

saketmehta wrote: post #31
roddds wrote: post #14

Pretty 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?

Decades of legacy code to maintain continuity of business (dont assume for a minute you can export or import data from many of these apps in any sort of sane way). I think a lot of businesses would be open to better designed products, but the aforementioned legacy compatibility and the need to train people on the new software make this a nonstarter. Pretty much the same reasons Microsoft Office is still so dominant, although I actually like the recent versions of office.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#93

Post by yousuckatlinux »

I can believe no one's said Oracle database. I keep thinking it's dead in favor of FOSS alternatives, but every large business I consult at has racks and racks dedicated to that tire fire, and a bunch of aging ODBAs itching to retire. And, Larry's still making an absolute fuckton of cash from it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#97

Post by satyanash »

hiyer wrote: post #82
satyanash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that was true for quite some time, it has dramatically improved to it's current state such that it is only noticeable during peak 'tatkal' booking time. The UI/UX is still horrible though.

The UI is horrible, but the UX is quite functional. And given the millions of people with various degrees of tech-savviness who use it, it's probably a good thing they haven't done a major revamp in years.

That still shouldn't prevent them from iteratively, slowly fixing the UI such that people have to only get used to small bits at a time.

It is one of the most unintuitive design I have seen. It only works because we're trained to it's quirkiness.

I also feel the UX is horrible because it will often log you out and demand that you log in again if you have performed a set number of actions repeatedly.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst-designed, slowest app that still makes a lot of money?

#98

Post by WalterGR »

hiyer wrote: post #84

Clearcase. I used to think Perforce was a bad VCS until I had the misfortune of having to use Clearcase. Perforce is no spring chicken, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to CC. And of course open source VCS'es like git and svn are light years ahead of both of these.

In what ways is svn light years ahead of Perforce?
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