Why Enterprise Software Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#241

Post by kd0amg » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #87

No, it's really more complicated than "Built to appeal to decision makers, not actual users." In terms of decision makers vs. users, the issue is that there is more than one group of users. For Blackboard, there are faculty, students, and administrators. There's a venn diagram of overlapping desires there, but there's also plenty of room for contradictory requirements. Second is the nature of enterprise software: --I…

What do administrators use Blackboard for, and is it actually very good at that?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#242

Post by T-hawk » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #192

freddie_mercury wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

>Why do you think it is called Microsoft Office? Some friendly fyi of MS history... Microsoft didn't use the "Office" branding until 1995. Before that, the computer industry called it "productivity software" instead of "enterprise software". In the 1990s, other software companies (like Borland and IBM) were bundling word processors + spreadsheets + presentations + databases into an "office suite" for a lower package…

There was also Microsoft Works, which was Microsoft's first integrated word processor, spreadsheet, and database. That was the low-cost consumer-level package for quite a while. It was often OEM-bundled, in hopes of eventually inducing users to buy into Office proper. Works was sold as late as 2007 before being retired in favor of Office instead.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#243

Post by Trias11 » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:33 PM UTC

Partially because enterprises are hiring el-cheapo hit-n-run development contractors via Tatas and alikes and all along this middlemen-infested food chain no one really cares about the product, users and customers.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#244

Post by your-nanny » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

People hate Word, Excel and Photoshop??? These are examples of wildly successful software used by consumers and in industry alike.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#245

Post by bryanmgreen » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

ridaj wrote: post #152

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…

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

As someone who is building a B2B SAAS company and made the decision to not focus on large-enterprise, I think you're both right.

At the end of the day, it's just plain hard to create a clean effective product that can be used by 5,000+ person organizations.

Regardless of use-case, boatloads of data will be collected in large-enterprise software and it has to be transferred and presented to many end-users in a clear way. And very rarely will it be one exclusive universal data-type. Usually it will contain varying types of information that will be needed by multiple teams and maybe across several different office locations. And that's just the product issues, let's not talk about sales or compliance.

It's just plain hard.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#246

Post by jancsika » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

> There are two types of baby outfits.

1. baby outfits marketed to people who cannot admit to themselves that they are poor.

2. baby outfits marketed to people who aren't poor.

The author is making a division between two types of outfits in the first category. The second category has no such division-- those consumers have enough money to pay for a product that looks good on the rack and is ergonomic.

Sorry.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#247

Post by lmm » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

mfer wrote: post #197

ridaj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

Enterprise software is a sub-class of business software. Enterprises often operate quite differently from SMBs. Public US companies will have things like SOX compliance. And, the enterprises offering up services, like email, may be competitors in another space. If you are competing with Google on phones do you want them to host your email? Likely not. The business world is complex. Some complex business software is f…

> For UX many have given up security features. Many of us now have free credit monitoring because that lack of security has lead to leaks everywhere. I know people who have had their identity stolen and even attacks on retirement funds all due to companies lacking in security. Our drive for the new shiny has left many vulnerable.

I would lay money that far more security vulnerabilities are due to overcomplicated customizability features than are due to simplified UX.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#248

Post by kragen » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

investinme wrote: post #224

kragen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a programming-by-demonstration system that lets you interactively develop a filter on one image, then apply it to many images?

Photoshop actually has that. They are called Actions (basically macros). You can select a group of operations you did in your editing history and turn them into an Action, with parametrization support. You can then batch apply an Action to a bunch of files.

Nice! I don't know if this is new since I last used it or if I just didn't know about it.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#249

Post by visiblink » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

We were forced to 'upgrade' years ago from WebCt to BlackBoard. The worst part was not the feature set, but re-learning all of the things you already knew how to do.

So when the administration decided to hold focus group sessions on whether to purchase a new system (because the prices were suddenly raised, IIRC), a few of us got Moodle included among the choices, and then managed to convince our colleagues and the institution to accept it with the most convincing rationale: the price would never change and since open source software tends to be evolutionary for the most part, we probably would not face having to re-learn how to use the system again.

I don't think you would be surprised to learn just how easy it was to convince users to accept a system that's unlikely to experience massive change.

In any case, we've been using Moodle for years now. It's basically the same as when they set it up, and all my labour-saving import-export tricks have remained consistent over the years.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#250

Post by nradov » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #189

nradov wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do the users of the software need to know about all that complexity? If the answer is: "they definitely do", then you are right. There's no way around it. If the answer is: "No, they only need to know about 4% of it. The rest can be automated and hidden away." then the problem is that people aren't incentivised to pay the cost of building that software. There is a broad solution: Hire engineers, UX designers, and pro…

In this area of enterprise software, the users absolutely need to know about the complexity for compliance reasons. Any errors can potentially result in criminal charges, civil liability, or at least bad PR and employee morale.

Payroll might seem simple but in reality it's full of complex edge cases. For example, employers sometimes receive court orders requiring them to periodically seize a certain amount from a particular employee's pay in order to satisfy a legal judgment. And in some cases there can actually be multiple such orders that would effectively reduce the employee's take home pay below zero. Now what do you do? Please explain how engineers, UX designers, and product managers can "manage" such complexity.