From the first tweet, I thought they were talking about the actual chalk-on Blackboard.
Why Enterprise Software Sucks
261–270 of 570 posts
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cust…
I would argue it's more complicated than that. In my experience, especially I started working for some enterprises, the people who make the complex software are also the ones putting in the time and care into security. It's not a causation but there is something to be said about culture.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#263Earlier 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…
The compelling feature of gsuite for my employer was apparently the ability to turn off IMAP etc and therefore rule out emails being kept locally/beyond the retention period for better access control/cheaper legal compliance, not anything UX related.
That's... Kind of hilarious.
I'm assuming your employer has never heard of printers or copy-paste. ;)
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#264I 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…
> 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 there's a different dynamic at play: the individual is making purchasing decisions based not on what they think the business needs but on what they personally want. E.g. JIRA has a huge number of micromanagement features that I doubt procurement departments are looking for; rather they appeal to managers in companies where they're the ones making purchasing decisions.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#265Because Blackboard was used as example, I just wanted to note that there are also open-source alternatives: A larger number of German public universities use ILIAS instead https://www.ilias.de/en/. While it has its quirks, I find it to be much more usable and flexible than Blackboard
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#266Disclaimer: I work at Instructure, the company that makes the LMS Princeton is moving too. Opinions are my own, etc 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 produ…
> 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.
Sounds familiar — that’s essential what Chegg did to all online reference management tools. They bough out RefME, CiteThisForMe, EasyBib, Citation Machine, BibMe, and probably some more that I don’t know off the top of my head. They then remove functionality from all the sites and shoved them full of ads for their other services.
Citationsy (https://citationsy.com) is still independent of course :-)
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Another big gotcha that hits large public organizations is that the software must be ADA compliant. This is extremely difficult and expensive to meet. Most small vendors do not meet the minimum requirements or even consider doing so.
I got to be a fly on the wall in an organization meeting where we realized our third-party UI vendor had no roadmap for internationalization.
That was an uncomfortable day. ;)
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#268I 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…
This, in my experience, is what seems like the most likely culprit. A CTO/CIO gets impressed by a fancy feature list when really, what would be the best fit is something simple, stable, and easy to use. We have more and more examples nowadays of ease of use beating out giant monoliths and it's only likely to continue except in a few fringe use cases.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#269I 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…
Exactly. They also control the workflow. If you don't like the 15 steps it takes to update your expense report, good for you, you won't get paid. Companies will lose deals unless they do what customers want. Eventually, that chunks up the software and makes it awful. That's just the nature of the beast, and it's no different than things were pre-computer. I had a .gov customer that had a very specific ruleset about s…
There's a similarly apocryphal story about cutting the ends of ham off.
https://sixsigmadsi.com/grandmas-ham-a-story-of-cultural-tra...
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#270I 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…
This has been my experience too, but with a slight difference - the new feature is very often an ask from sales, who are trying to close either a big new sale, or a big renewal. The prospect/customer demands some obscure feature that like 1% of our users will use (at most), but they’re a big prospect/customer. Product/UX/dev push back, say we should be working on features, performance and reliability that will benefit most customers, but it’s hard to come up with the precise revenue impact of this. Sales are better at convincing execs, and “this will help us close a $1 mil/year deal” is very tangible, so the new feature gets built.
This is kind of a symptom of “the buyer isn’t the user”, though. Often we build these features, then monitor usage, and the customer that demanded it doesn’t even use it! Or we build it, and it doesn’t matter, we still don’t close the sale.
I think the core issue is “building for users” and “building to close specific sales” are often strongly at odds with one another, and most of the time “building to close specific sales” wins.