Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Enterprise Software Sucks

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 570 posts

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#121

Post by xivzgrev »

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…

This makes sense. Given my experience in tech startup land, im going to take a stab at how this happens from inside the company.

Lets say you are starting sn enterprise saas company, woohoo! You have your initial product and customers love it, yes! Things are starting to hum along nicely.

Now your sales people are identiying new markets and saying “hey if we add feature x and y, we can make $x million more per year from x y and z clients”.

At this critical juncture, managwment most likely approves and has UX involved, but adding the features will be the priority regardless. Theres no overrulin g UX voice that can say “no, dont build that feature because theres no way to maintain the delightful user experience” because MONEY IS ON THE TABLE! Execs got revenue goals to hit, sales people have revenue goals to hit, and this seems like a match made in heaven. Additionally, its important to point out that pioneering companies dont know all the end state user flows at the beginning so they are hacking along, reacting as they learn more about end customers.

Now fast forward a decade. The software is bloated but has grown a lot. Users hate it. New startups look at your product, your end customers, and say “hey! We can do this more simply and steal their customers”. And they can, because they have the advantage of starting from the ground up, KNOWING THE CUSTOMERS and their workflows. So of course they can build a more efficient product because they have the clear end vision - your product, but with the bloat cut out.

Your team has already done the hard work of identifying the best and largest customer use cases.

So what’s the solution? Acquire these upstarts or make your company a platform. I dont what blackboard has done here but salesforce is still by far the largest game in town despite universal hate. Why? In large part due to the vast network of 3rd party developers who can configure salesforce to a customer’s complicated workflows. They’ve actually taken this problem (it’s complicated to use) and turned it into a retention feature. No wonder they have a giant skyscraper in san francisco.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#122

Post by collyw »

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

I would say that its because people understand how to use it.

Excel is frequently used as a database, not because it makes a good database but because people don't understand how to use Access (or any other relational database) but Excel is easy enough that they can get something usable.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#123

Post by journalctl »

swalsh wrote: post #115
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…

Sometimes I wonder, what if we just fundamentally took a new approach the OS. Today at the root of your operating system is the file system. It would be interesting if the file system was changed to essentially the concept of a simple object store. In much the same way we have "standard file formats" today, we could move to something like a "standard class". Objects would be a first class citizen in the OS. I think t…

Filesystems that abstract away things like directories aren’t new, they just haven’t been commercially successful (I believe Vista was going to include WinFS, which was a database-like filesystem, but it was scrapped). It’s not that systems research has suddenly stopped, it’s that it’s really really hard to not only introduce radical ideas to the public, it’s also hard to make sure you don’t break existing billion-dollar systems at the same time. And as anyone who’s had the misfortune of using a network share over a flaky connection can tell you, abstracting files away over networks is tricky business, and when your connection fails (which it will), that abstraction breaks.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#124

Post by joncp »

swalsh wrote: post #115
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…

Sometimes I wonder, what if we just fundamentally took a new approach the OS. Today at the root of your operating system is the file system. It would be interesting if the file system was changed to essentially the concept of a simple object store. In much the same way we have "standard file formats" today, we could move to something like a "standard class". Objects would be a first class citizen in the OS. I think t…

> do away with "applications". opting instead for a smaller unit of executable

This sounds a lot like Android's "activities" concept which doesn't get enough love, in my opinion.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#125

Post by yiyus »

investinme wrote: post #70
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".

ImageMagick is great, I use it all the time. Photoshop is superb for interactive image editing, but if you need to crop a thousand images, change brightness, add some text on top, and merge them one next to the other, for example, and you need to do this every day, a sciptable tool is essential, and I really appreciate having all the power of Unix instead of a limited environment that requires a huge platform.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#126

Post by bhauer »

jasode wrote: post #72
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…

>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…

I had the same reaction. I was wondering, "Since when are Word, Excel, and Photoshop enterprise software?" I've been using these as consumer desktop software for decades.

That said, I do agree with GP that enterprise software is complex because it's designed to be adaptable to existing processes, whereas simpler software seeks to adapt the user to its prescribed process. And even without being an enterprise, I often find myself drawn to software that adapts to my needs and preferences rather than the other way around.

Just because the advent of mobile-focused product sensibility has seen a (regrettable, in my opinion) general drift toward significantly reduced feature sets in software does not mean that existing software with broad feature sets is now "enterprise."

Anecdotally, 20 years ago, scores of programs allowed the user to easily and broadly customize the colors of their user interface. That sort of flexibility was among the first features on the mobile simplification chopping block. As a result, most software created within the past few years has a single "true and good" color scheme dictated by the designer. Today we see that evolving slightly with the popularity of "dark" schemes, giving the user a choice between two, but only two, designer-crafted themes.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#127

Post by tomatocracy »

ch4s3 wrote: post #33
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…

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.

Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience:

- lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA.

- weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to fix it. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel

- lack of decent built in formula tracing (ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree). There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in.

- lack of a decent way to see what’s changed between two versions of a spreadsheet

I’d also say there’s an inordinate amount of abusing Excel to do database tasks out there. People have spreadsheets which take minutes to recalculate which could be done in less than a second even using Access, let alone a ‘proper’ DB.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#128

Post by investinme »

Kaiyou wrote: post #119
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".

Personally, I yearn for a command line image editor. ImageMagick is nice, but it can't do everything. Once you've gone cli, it's hard to go back to gui applications, since they're so inefficient.

You can only say this if you have a very limited imagination of what "image editor" is.

Please explain to me how you imagine creating a mask around a human so that you can "extract" him from the background in the command line.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#129

Post by astura »

ineptech wrote: post #43
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…

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?

Yes, some job application portals are extremely clunky, however, the most common job application portal I've seen as a job seeker is iCIMS which I actually don't actually have any major complaints about. That's also what my current and former employeer uses. The name is certainly clunky though!

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#130

Post by PeterisP »

hyperpape wrote: post #29
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…

I would say yes and no. It's true that enterprises have complex and unique workflows, and that this drives the complexity of enterprise software. What I doubt is that this complexity is actually adding value in most cases. There is a nice equilibrium where companies adopt simple best practice workflows for non-core competencies, and vendors compete on how effectively they can implement those simple workflows. In real…

Thing is, enterprises have multiple incompatible workflows but still need to make it work. I.e. due to mergers and acquisitions different parts of the company have 3 different, incompatible IT workflows for part procurement.

Of course that's bad and a single system is highly desired - so the company is working on it, and within a year these three workflows are going to be combined in a single system. Naturally, that system isn't simple as it needs to combine the peculiarities of these three workflows.

Of course that's bad, and a single simpler workflow is highly desired - so the company is working on it, and within 2-3 years the processes are going to be adjusted and unified so that there's a reasonable single process.

However, there's another acquisition that's going to be finalized soon, and during these 2-3 years at least one more is going to happen, so by the time these workflows are unified and simplified, they will be joined by new parts of the company using different workflows, and the enterprise will be back to square one with 3 separate systems with incompatible workflows for doing the same thing.

Post reply on HN