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I have seen too many people in it NOT clicking this huge waste of space away but instead always scrolling down before doing anything.
User don't care that much apparently.
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…
That’s not a great business to run though as it’s very difficult to scale.
Far too many fall into the trap of saying yes to the first BigCo that comes by early on because they need the $$. While they neglect every other niche and business where it could fit like a glove.
Or more often doesn’t even bother legitimately testing it on the open market since their very limited programming time is spent serving BigCo and doing support.
A lot of companies using SaaS have a bunch of different systems interconnected with Zapier or their own systems. Which IMO is far more like Unix than x product that turns into a full blown CRM, CMS, ERP etc tacked on top a niche product.
Building highly customized software also generates tons of risk for smaller companies as it binds their entire revenue on the success of a small group of other companies who may die, switch core business, or get stolen away by a bigger enterprise software sales team.
I’d much rather build a niche software product and instead of building a CRM on top just add every sort of API, webhook, Zapier, or direct integration. Or isolate them into separate products with shared authentication and logging systems.
> "OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can't easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on… checklists of features. ️" Former Blackboarder here with +50 implementations in 4 years. Blackboard and its main competitors -- specially the best ones -- are extrem…
It's unsettling the way you're willing to come right out and admit that.
> Internal software only has to work in one situation on one company’s computers.… Here usability is a lower priority, because a limited number of people need to use the software, and they don’t have any choice in the matter, and they will just have to deal with it. Speed of development is more important. Because the value of the development effort is spread over only one company, the amount of development resources that can be justified is significantly less.
So, a lot of enterprise software sucks because it simply doesn't make sense to make it decent. No matter how directly the end users communicate with the developers, this won't change.
The economics of internal software don't apply to products like Blackboard (which would go in Joel's "shrinkwrap" category), but the vast majority of enterprise software is internal and thus sucks for reasons entirely unrelated to this thread.
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 is the nominal reason executives responsible for inflicting terrible software on their workers tell themselves. But it's not always true. In fact it may often not be true. In many cases the assumptions about how much training is necessary to use the software are all wrong in the first place and the only reason so much training is required is because they chose such terrible software in the first place.
> People hate them because they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.
No, in fact it's often that they LACK features and are NOT properly configurable, because they are simply bad software from the very core. You often have a rigid and unwieldy platform with features inelegantly bolted on by underpaid programmers to satisfy corporate buzzword checklists. The end-user experience is furthermore left for last. So not only are you trying to design a UI on a garbage platform, it's your lowest priority. So worker efficiency takes a hit, a hit that you can't measure so you just dismiss and issue beatings to anyone who doesn't use your awfully-designed software effectively.
For a real-life example:
Good Trouble Ticketing Software designed around trying to help teams track work and be more efficient: Request Tracker from Best Practical.
Bad Trouble Ticketing Software nominally designed around being "ITIL compliant" and providing nice reports to management, but is actually just really large badly designed CRUD: Service Now.
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…
Much of what is called "enterprise software" is actually more like a proprietary programming language or framework, which you will have to pay specialists to program your application in, with bad debugging tools.
Lastly, Oracle and SAP and etc. aren't actually good at the problem you describe, as attested to by the many users who hate their products. They're just good at selling their software to the decision makers (not 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.
If anyone even uses it at all! I have a friend who works in a sales role for IBM. He told me that part of his bonus is contingent on being able to prove that the customer has actually installed the software which they bought. The policy apparently arose because certain public sector entities had refused to consider new deals since they still hadn't got round to installing the software for which they had paid millions…
It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it.
Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion dollar consultancy companies engage in.
Plus IBM makes even more doing the “integration” than the original sale.
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".
It's a jumbled mess of features added over the years with no coherent UI workflow between them. It hides way too much of the complexity of image editing in one-click-effect solutions, that often don't compose well.
I don't know of any good competitors in its price range though. I would recommend Nuke if it wasn't that expensive.
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 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…
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].