Why Enterprise Software Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#61

Post by samsolomon » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

vfc1 wrote: post #9

Pretty true. For example, some of the worst applications I have ever used are by far timesheet applications. It's a product with a completely captive audience, that cannot go to the competition. If you don't fill your timesheet, you don't get paid its that simple. Typically these are either built-in house, or are an expensive third party product with terrible usability, bought by managers who might not even have to u…

I wholeheartedly agree. I think part of the reason I ended up on the product-software side of design was that the timesheet software our agency used was infuriatingly bad. It was like a windows-web port. I'd have to bill an extra quarter, just for the time it took to put in a change order.

EDIT: A little embarassing, but I found an attempt I did at redesigning that timesheet software from 2014. https://dribbble.com/shots/1501268-Webvantage-Timesheet

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#62

Post by throwaway744678 » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #54

fasicle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.

Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.

I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#63

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #48

duxup wrote: post #17

I used to work in support at a big company. We went through endless Salesforce resigns with folk's who don't use them all making decisions and patting themselves on the back for each redesign. It was horrific as a user experience, everyone is a UI expert and had an opinion based on this one time a thing happened... 3 years ago... In fact most every decision was made dude to some anecdotal incident where the person wh…

CRM products tend to be super easy to customise, so they often end up a complete mess simply because it is so easy to add or change stuff.

That's a really good point. In general, the more you reduce the cost of doing a thing, the more of that thing you'll end up with. The Jevons paradox.

If the reduced cost is of making gratuitious changes to a system's appearance or interface ... you'll end up with a bunch of gratuitious UI changes.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#64

Post by sedeki » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

mjlee wrote: post #7

I'm not sure where this originates from, but the most succinct definition I've heard for "Enterprise Software" is that the person who pays for it isn't the person who uses it.

Maybe because "someone else pays for it" implies more than one person involved, which usually means an enterprise?

Do you consider the G Suite to be enterprise software?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#65

Post by oarsinsync » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

java-man wrote: post #18

save_ferris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. Whoever buys it usually checks off a list of features that it needs, but has no idea if it does any of those things particularly well.

I've seen this with mobile phones in the 90's-2000's. Until Apple came up with the iPhone designed for the end users, the phones' buyers were the networks, not the end users. The same goes for companies like LinkedIn - they are now driven by recruiters and not the end users. Thus the idiotic interface and functionality changes that basically makes it unusable [to the most of the users].

I dunno, the Nokia 3210 (and successors 3310 and 8210) were pretty good phones given the available technology at the time.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#66

Post by felideon » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

You raise a good point, but it doesn't mean the OP is wrong. There is an inflection point where, even if the software was originally designed with a target user (persona) in mind, the features that keep getting added are designed for the buyer. It is impossible to design software that works for wide set of personas.

Melissa Perri calls it the Build Trap: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/escaping-build-trap-melissa-p...

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#67

Post by probablybroken » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

Tsarbomb wrote: post #47

ch4s3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love excel and Photoshop. I’ve never met any heavy excel user that prefers any other spreadsheet software or even has anything negative to say about it.

I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis. The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.…

That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#68

Post by yxhuvud » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #4

This is changing though. A fair number of solutions such as Slack are easy enough to use and get a hold of that teams within large enterprises can simply start using them.

Give Slack 15 years and see if Enterprise complexity won't have crept in.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#69

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

That sounds like a Conway's Law, but of large purchasers, rather than of software developers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#70

Post by investinme » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

Nobody hates Photoshop. In fact it's one of the most loved software out there.

I'm a developer and a Photoshop user and love it. The Unix philosophy would be a disaster for a image editing software (ImageMagick much?)

Once a developer who spent all day in VIM & co was honestly arguing with me that Photoshop should be a command line app. I filled that under "shit developers say" and "delusional".