151–160 of 570 posts
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> 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.
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…
There absolutely are outlier businesses like banking, government, healthcare and other highly regulated fields where they do have critical control needs. Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX.
But the average business does not really have such needs, or at least it can be a mistake to blindly trade off employee happiness and productivity against feature checklists, yet that is typically the approach employed by procurement experts.
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…
It's also worth pointing out that the simpler the software, the more likely it is to fit in with more companies' workflows. As soon as you start adding niche features the more likely it is that they won't fit neatly with most places they are sold into.
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> 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 s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
First things first, Blackboard is some of the worst of enterprise software and a huge part of why they have lost so much market share is not only because they had a difficult and obtuse to use product, it is also because they were extremely aggressive in buying out any competition and EOLing their products and forcing schools against their will onto Blackboard.
And I think this is the bit that is often the case about the worst enterprise software is the it gets to a point where customers are so entrenched that the company behind the product has market forces that drive it to grow through unhealthy means that are often hostile to customers.
To his conclusion about all software tending towards these same problems, I can't agree more. It is a HUGE challenge to continue to deliver software that remains easy and friendly to use in light of the real need to add real features. You simply can't just ignore the market that thinks differently about a given problem and the workflow to solve it.
I think the right answer to this problem is not just really great product and UX (though that is critical), the real challenge is to figure out the underlying technology platform and engineering process that makes it cheap to build new features and compose them together without the complexity becoming overwhelming for your average engineering team. From what I can tell, this sort of architecture looks vastly different from how most software is started and how we think about software in general. Making that transition is one of the hardest things to do in engineering and it is what sets apart companies who continue to deliver well liked software and those companies that tend towards being defined by worst tropes of "enterprise software"
Why do all bug trackers start out as "simpler than $TODAY'S_DOMINANT_BUG_TRACKER", only to become the thing that tomorrow's bug tracker is simpler than? Why do programming languages almost all start as a "simple alternative to $X", only to be the thing that needs a simpler alternative in 10 years? Why are there so many UNIX shells that start as "simple alternatives" but then grow too large? Why are there so many libraries and frameworks that started out as "lightweight" but grew into monsters?
Because the problem is in the incentive structure of the problem space, not the terrible programmers who just couldn't resist adding so much complexity.
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 fantastic.
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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…
A lot of SaaS businesses aren’t really SaaS, they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers. 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…
That's true, but sort of necessarily so, though. How else do you build a product that meets such a broad set of needs? Someone's got to do the work. At some point, features are going to drop linearly.
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…