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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 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…
I'd refine your examples somewhat. The author's idea of "enterprise software" would be more like SAP/Salesforce/JIRA. A client-server model type of software (data lives in big central corporate databases) instead of being documents-oriented (user data lives in files like .xlsx, .docx, .psd).
In contrast, the other desktop software of Photoshop/Word/Excel is often bought by consumers outside of enterprises because that's the software they prefer. (E.g. artists buy Photoshop instead of using GIMP.) And in the workplace, a lot of analysts like using MS Excel.
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".
And, FBOW Linux has the Gimp, which I prefer to Photoshop, though that's largely on account of familiarity.
ImageMagick itself is invaluable when what you need to do is programmatically change large numbers of images. I've seen it used on large (multi-million user) image-heavy sites as the standard image handling flow (thumbnails and default previews of standard sizes).
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…
You need more Design Ducks: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
I kind of do something like that.
I put a lot of the things I find unnecessary / unused in places that stay out of the way of the user. I check the metrics and yeah, nobody uses them, so there they stay. In a way like a duck it gives them a place to make changes ... that is safe for everyone.
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'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.
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…
Ditto with job applicant portals. They have a bunch of weird features for doing obscure HR stuff like internal approval chains, but terrible UX for the actual applicant. Would it be so hard to handle applicants whose resume is a url?
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…
(with the separation of concerns not really mattering in the usage of the tools)
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…
The root of the problem is that the people holding the checklists are not the same people who have to use the software. Which was the point of the Twitter thread.
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.…
Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone. Somebody needs to get over himself.