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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#101

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

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…

> they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.

If enterprises were selecting for this then you would expect emacs to be the most used enterprise software of all time. :-P

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#102

Post by v77 »

airstrike wrote: post #83
jasode wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. 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…

In the workplace, people like using MS Excel because the alternatives are ridiculously inferior

Yes, I certainly wouldn't call Office enterprise software.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#103

Post by Crinus »

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…

> they are the complete antithesis of the Unix philosophy that so many designers and developers prefer. Word, Excel

Interestingly, Word and Excel were the origins of OLE in Windows 3.x times that was meant to allow embedding documents of one application inside another so that each application can focus on doing one thing well. The original documentation even explicitly wrote something along these lines.

I always thought that OLE was basically Microsoft's attempt to bring Unix's "do one thing well" composability to GUI applications.

(things changed considerably with Windows 95 and COM though and that part about doing one thing well was removed)

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#104

Post by imgabe »

It's like how the decision to write a blog post as a series of tweets is really easy for the writer who doesn't have to deal with the task of reading a series of disjointed blurbs of text.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#105

Post by xamuel »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #85
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.

Half of the people I know who love Excel in that way would now be making significantly more money if they didn't. These people fall into two groups: The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now. The othe…

Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for years and years!

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#106

Post by wikiman »

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…

In my experience with most Enterprise software, the problem isn't the number of features it's the total lack of discipline in deciding what features are actually needed. Jira is the worst at this because people throw spaghetti at the wall until they get something that "works" for PMs but nobody else understands. I've worked at exactly one place that really was careful about JIRA and what made sense from the tool and it was a joy. I imagine the same is true of Salesforce though I've never seen anyone actually pull it off

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#107

Post by investinme »

kragen wrote: post #98
investinme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It's strange that someone who spends all day in Vim (which is not an acronym, by the way), an editor driven by keystrokes rather than the command line like ex or edlin, would prefer a command-line Photoshop. I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. A keystroke-driven Photoshop might be something like Blender. I think netpbm is more Unixy than ImageMagick. I've had good experiences wit…

> I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered.

No, that dev never did any serious image editing. He was just full of himself and of the "superior UNIX philosophy", the thought that there might be domains where that doesn't apply just never crossed his mind (image/audio/video editing being a major one)

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#108

Post by Scuds »

You'd think publicly funded schools would have a system-wide public software infrastructure project instead of just writing a check to Blackboard every year to infinity.

I always wondered why full time academic-oriented OSS activists like RMS didn't campaign for things like this instead of trying to sell the concept of "OSS in General"

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#109

Post by blantonl »

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…

very few companies have the billions of development dollars the above handful of companies have to throw at the problem to try to make it tractable.

95% of "enterprise software" is typically a small developer team of 5-10 people that delivers a product with some features, usually developed in and around J2EE, CORBA, COBOL, etc. It's then sold and supported by a marketing, sales, conference, booth, and sales engineering budget of billions of dollars. Haha!

The other 5% of enterprise software is what you described above. :)

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#110

Post by samsolomon »

A bit of insight into the complexities of designing enterprise software—I'm a product designer who's been fortunate enough to work on a fast growing product. When I joined our average number of seats was probably about 20. I'd imagine it's now 10x that.

As the post mentions the buyer is not always the end-user and in the enterprise space features are often prioritized for the buyer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but enterprise product teams should watch out for buyer-focused features that deteriorate the end-user's experience. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that.

There is also a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. It is often impossible to do both and larger customers will always want flexibility.

Designing for multi-level hierarchies within organizations is also exceptionally difficult—visibility, access controls, permissions, groups, group hierarchies—these have all been the most difficult features I've ever worked on.

I have immense respect for the product teams at Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and the other enterprise software companies. The stuff is not easy.

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