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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#161

Post by ian0 »

blantonl wrote: post #109
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 engineeri…

On point! And so begins the large IT company lifecycle...

- Those hundreds of sales engineers weave a spaggeti junction of pseudo products around the core application to suit the whims of the C-level clients and their buzzwords of the month

- The company gets frustrated when this begins to break down leading to sales delays and embarks on a disasterous rearchitect which pits the sales engineers (microservices!) and core engineers against each other.

- The sales delays lead to cost cutting and the old guard make a timely exit with a nice package. The laid off sales engineers get a better gig due to the buzzwords on the cv.

- At some stage in the old guard are brought back to maintain the old core that is still running the company, but now charge a hefty consultant rate.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#162

Post by wolco »

tomatocracy wrote: post #127
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.

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…

You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#163

Post by _bxg1 »

For my senior project, they had us prototype a replacement for Blackboard. This was not just an exercise: the CS department was seriously considering building and maintaining their own alternative.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#164

Post by hyperpape »

PeterisP wrote: post #130
hyperpape wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, I'm aware. I work in enterprise software. I see what the customers want.

I've also been on the receiving end: my company has one tool that doesn't work well. So for three years, there's been a push to get rid of it, but there's never been agreement on any replacement.

There's one particular use case that stakeholders think isn't handled by the replacements. The result is that we use both tools, and manually synchronize them. Someone wrote a bespoke automated tool to bridge those two SaaS apps, but it doesn't remove the manual synchronization, just reduces it.

Oh, these tools? They aren't for something low touch. People are in both tools constantly. There are questions about which pieces of information are accurate, and who's responsible for which updates. The time waste is significant.

But the problem isn't the software. The problem is that people can't make a decision. When you ask someone higher up, you get vague assurances that we're still thinking about the issue. In the case of the companies with their mergers, having one tool support both systems isn't doing anyone any favors. It just lets them limp along with excess complexity.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#165

Post by wolco »

Udik wrote: post #97
mattkrause wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, really? As in '=somme(A1:A10)' to add a column?

Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.

People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#166

Post by kragen »

sct202 wrote: post #100
kragen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records Dude, if it fits on your laptop disk, it's not big data. Here you're talking about “big data” that fits in RAM on my cellphone . Somebody needs to get over himself.

Right, if it's only millions of records, why can't Google sheets accommodate it.

DHTML involves trading 99.9% or so of your computational power for greater convenience of programming.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#167

Post by investinme »

kragen wrote: post #140
investinme wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fro…

I was talking more about the GUI/command line divide.

SolidWorks/Blender are fundamentally GUI apps, even if they do contain some programmatic features (like parametric filters/models/...). Also, all media software have something like "Unix tools who do one thing well" - plugins, filters, ..., but you compose them using the GUI.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#168

Post by therealdrag0 »

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…

> writing complex, highly configurable software is hard.

Especially overtime! And especially when different parts of the elephant are done to please different customers! It's hard to manage tech debt and feature creep when the software is being pushed in 4 directions by business, even if business has VERY close relations with customers (like companies I've worked for do).

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#169

Post by freddie_mercury »

bhauer wrote: post #126
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…

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…

> Since when are Word, Excel [...] enterprise software?

Since Word 1.0.

Why do you think it is called Microsoft Office? The 1989 edition of Microsoft Word cost $500, equivalent to over $1,000 today, for a single seat. That's not consumer software.

Microsoft Home didn't exist until 1993, a decade into Office's life, when it had achieved complete enterprise dominance -- thanks largely to its competitors' failure to release Windows version in a timely fashion in the late 1980s & early 1990s -- and Microsoft began pushing into consumer software.

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