211–220 of 570 posts
The same issue is one of the factors that causes health care in the US to be so maddening. US health care is essentially enterprise medicine. Patients receive it but insurance companies pay for it, and the two agendas are not aligned.
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Exactly right, even to the point of bringing up a few specific industries that do in fact have specialized needs.
But when the enterprise software authors want to capture 100% of the marketplace, they are, of course, writing their offering to support those few specific industries. ... which adds features to the product as a whole, which other customers will need to be aware of and might take advantage of.
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 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. Bingo—the dysfunction of the software reflects the dysfunction of the organization.
My slightly geekier explanation for Why Enterprise Software Sucks is to simply link to this facetious GH repo: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... This is fantastic.
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.
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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.
Not sure about the generalization to enterprise software in general, but the critique of people choosing blackboard is spot on. Before selecting a tool, professors should always ask: "is this the tool that two recent graduates would choose without my intervention?". Because to use any other tool is to deprive your students of skills they'll likely need. Also: > Once profs and students put down the pitchforks, committ…
Every popular computer OS except android has an ssh client now. Just give the students and professors shells and have them put the documents in shared folders.
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Exactly right, even to the point of bringing up a few specific industries that do in fact have specialized needs.
But when the enterprise software authors want to capture 100% of the marketplace, they are, of course, writing their offering to support those few specific industries. ... which adds features to the product as a whole, which other customers will need to be aware of and might take advantage of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your point about Vim not following Unix philosophy, also the way Vim and Blender are similar. I disagree that the GUI/command line divide is a "surface appearance". I'm not talking about Vim/VS Code kind of thing, where one is implemented in the command line, the other in the GUI, but are basically the same. I'm talking about apps which fundamentally require a pointing device. In Photoshop you point at a…
Vim is not a command-line program. It's a screen editor. The command-line equivalents are Perl, ex, and sed. I agree that writing +100+200x17x25 is a terrible UI design for drawing. But you’ll notice that Vim doesn't use such an interaction design for text; and typing the 100 and 200 into the properties box of a Quartz Composer processing node doesn't make it any better. So it sounds like you're attacking a straw man…
I'm just saying that you can perfectly use Vim without a mouse, in fact most guides recommend you to disable mouse (and cursor) support.
But you can't use Photoshop or Blender without a mouse. Sure, you technically can, in a limited way, you can for example crop images or apply global filters in PS with just the keyboard, the same in Blender, but certain core manipulations are impossible in both without a mouse.
I would argue that it's because of the much higher resolution of images/3d data. 80x50 with a 100 character alphabet versus 2000x2000 with a 16.7 mil alphabet. In Vim you say "move the cursor after 'func'". How would that work in Photoshop? "move the cursor after RGB(25, 15, 9) RGB(98, 126, 22)?" You can't even see the pixels in PS, let alone guess their values.
There are pixel art editors which are completely usable with just the keyboard, but they are used for images smaller than 256x256.
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Pay, HR, and expense tracking are extremely complex areas due to federal / state / local labor laws, collective bargaining agreements, and individual organizational policies. Any application which deals with all those complexities will inevitably be full of defects and usability problems. There is no solution, it's simply reality.
> Any application which deals The problem here is putting the cart before the horse and expecting the software to implement policies for you. If you can't design a workflow to work and be compliant without new software, you probably do not know enough about your own workflow to purchase software that will actually improve it.