I think one person choosing and others using (and/or maintaining) software is a part of the reason, but another part is that "enterprise software" is essentially a single software package used by multiple users, usually incompatible with standard and open protocols/formats: even when the person choosing it is happy to (and does) use it, it still can be (and often is, IME) awful for others, due to differences in preferences and requirements.
Why Enterprise Software Sucks
331–340 of 570 posts
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#332I 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…
Office 365 isn't even gdpr compliant.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. ;)
Not every employer hires folks like you who go out of their way to print confidential emails so they can violate customer privacy.
MANY employers have folks who unless you put a speed bump in their way would have employees inadvertently sync their entire email history onto their kids computer or a random computer while traveling.
The ENTIRE POINT of MANY of google's settings is to allow for those railings to be put in place. This is so employees who aren't out to abuse data can go about their day with reduced risk of inadvertently screwing up.
This is a big risk factor (I'd argue a much bigger risk factor than intentional employee misbehvior).
Additionally, once these controls are in place you can actually drive even better security where needed - it is possible to do a USB / printer / no phone lockout for high security ops - and is done when needed (very rarely). Thin clients are actually popular here - remote desktops another layer making it harder to dump the x million records out of system.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#334Some very valid points in that twitter threads.
Enterprise software sucks because most companies who build them hardly have product designers. The distance between people who build those softwares and end users is quite a lot and no direct communication is usually possible. Most of the people building these software have zero idea of what the end user stories look like.
My wife, an optometrist, spent many a evenings complaining about the severe lack of usability in the software she had to use everyday. It is so bad that when she quit her job she found another firm which used the same software so that she did not have to go through learning yet another crappy software again.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#335I 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…
I second this. Writing custom software for a few users with complex and custom business cases is very hard. UX goes out the window because of the large feature set and the low productivity of each programmer.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#336Earlier 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…
>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. The iPhone took almost a decade to get to the appropriate functionality. The part you're leaving out is most executives just ended up carrying two devices and whined to IT about "why can't YOU make my iphone as good at email as my bl…
I mostly agree although I also think a lot of businesses think they are a lot snowflake-ier than they actually are.
But in my experience, smaller businesses can actually be worse offenders in this regard. Large enterprises actually do have a lot of complex needs and even relatively small changes affect a lot of people. But I've had someone at a very small company argue with me that they needed their own Exchange server because Gmail (at the time) didn't have some features like sub-labels/folders that they were used to.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#337I had the impression, after working in two big corps, often even the "IT people" working there don't know much about IT.
Sure, the people who run their data-centers often know their stuff, but "IT professionals" in their other depts are some business people with some extra IT training.
Often there is at least one person who doesn't know what they are doing, but doesn't say so. Which leads to bad decisions.
One is enough, because all the people who say "they don't know" will go to the ones who don't say it. Then you end up with some a whole bunch of subtle implementation details that are based on wrong decisions, but accumulated to one big mess.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#338I 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…
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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's... Kind of hilarious. I'm assuming your employer has never heard of printers or copy-paste. ;)
You're thinking about this very much from a techy point of view. We have a similar value prop with our platform (we store PII including actual identity documents). It's not about making it impossible for users to download and store sensitive data. Everyone knows that that's impossible - yet somehow Snapchat and its disappearing messages is still a thing. Instead, it is intended to be coupled with policies. As long as…
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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#340This is also why training often sucks: the teachers write the presentation not for the people sitting in the class (who are often required to attend), but for the people who run the training office or the supervisors who order the training.