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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#131

Post by mattkrause »

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".

Same, but for Illustrator.

I hate the price and subscription model, and the learning curve has some steep spots, but once you're up and running, it's fantastic. I want to like Inkscape, but I've hit too many weird bugs (text getting squashed, transparency disappearing randomly). I'm curious about Affinity Designer though.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#132

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Exactly. They also control the workflow. If you don't like the 15 steps it takes to update your expense report, good for you, you won't get paid.

Companies will lose deals unless they do what customers want. Eventually, that chunks up the software and makes it awful. That's just the nature of the beast, and it's no different than things were pre-computer.

I had a .gov customer that had a very specific ruleset about stapling paper forms a certain way, which impacted how certain processes worked after they were computerized. Nobody understood why, then we found out -- in a tragic accident, a key employee in one of the paper processes in the 70s lost an arm. They ended up stapling things a certain way to accomodate his constraint and optimize throughput. The practice spread to other areas. 30-40 years later, after the employee was long retired and dead, the process lived on.

In the case of something like Word, people who write need to do stuff. I probably use 30% of Word features, but in the 2 times in the last decade that I needed to create a document with a table of figures, it's there.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#133

Post by mjlee »

sedeki wrote: post #64
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?

It's a little tongue in cheek, but I think the distinction with G Suite is that the person who pays for it, also uses it.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#134

Post by ThomPete »

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…

Exactly or put another way.

Companies only use 5% of the features the more sophisticated enterprise software is offering but it's a different 5% each of them use.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#135

Post by amenod »

joncp wrote: post #124
swalsh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This! Also the concept of Intents is pure genius.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#136

Post by tartoran »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

My slightly geekier explanation for Why Enterprise Software Sucks is to simply link to this facetious GH repo: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

This is not a joke! Well, it is a joke not meant as a joke as this is pretty much the state of most enterprise software nowadays.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#137

Post by Juliate »

basseq wrote: post #116
Juliate wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is ... very few companies do actually use all the complex configuration of said purchased software. Rather, they are stuck with it. And deal with it, limiting the contact surface, until they cannot bear it anymore, and spend more to upgrade/get some consulting to have the solution reorganized for them. On one hand, you have purchase departments that are not the target users, and decide only based on paper r…

> The thing is ... very few companies do actually use all the complex configuration of said purchased software. That's the point, though. Enterprise software is a superset (E) of all features that a large group of very diverse customers need. An individual customer has a need for a much smaller set of features (C). That enterprise software may very well be the best software that includes all those needed features: C…

> That enterprise software may very well be the best software that includes all those needed features.

How come you can't have something nice & even decently working for: pay, HR, vacation, expenses tracking?

Or more, how is it possible that obviously unfit and malfunctioning solutions (for problems that have been known, solved and specified for years) are still on the market in 2019 in companies that pretend to be serious about software?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#138

Post by vgetr »

xivzgrev wrote: post #121
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 f…

This makes sense to me. Sometimes it’s not even about more money but existence entirely. Seeing as that VisiCalc was _the Spreadsheet_ up until Lotus came along and ate their lunch, it’s easy to see that sometimes features and other external forces may have more of an impact than the raw popularity of a product in the end.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#140

Post by kragen »

investinme wrote: post #107
kragen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy.

I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work.

We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.

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