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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#371

Post by spamizbad »

gertrunde wrote: post #348
scarface74 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blackberry???" That’s not true. The iPhone became good enough to replace the BlackBerry around 4 or 5 years in. By 2011, the BlackBerry was losing market share as Apple added enterprise fea…

And yet neither Android nor iPhone today as as good at doing email as Blackberry was 10 years ago. They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.

I always thought their killer feature was the fact that they'd operate on pager frequencies, so you could get an email (or at least a portion of it) in what was quite often a cellular deadzone. Largely moot these days between the proliferation of WiFi and LTE repeaters.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#373

Post by shitgoose »

true_religion wrote: post #358
gertrunde wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet neither Android nor iPhone today as as good at doing email as Blackberry was 10 years ago. They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.

What did blackberry do so well in email?

I, for example, enjoyed the wheel. Scroll wheel to email you want to read, press wheel to open, scroll to read. To be honest I don't remember how I close email, click wheel again or another button, but the whole experience can be done with one hand/thumb easily, while holding coffee in another hand. Try that with iPhone.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#374

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #229
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…

A decent computer was $3,000, or 6x the price of MS Word: https://www.zdnet.com/article/1991s-pc-technology-was-unbeli... Today Office is $150, and decent computers are still in the 6x/$900 range. The shift was in computers, from enterprise to consumer, and the software followed.

MS Office Pro is £420 [1].

A Dell all-in-one (not especially budget), is £580 [2]. A bulk buy for enterprise would be cheaper. This is inclusive of the cost of MS Windows OS.

In the UK a computer that can run MS Office decently costs around the price of the software.

You can see why MS create a new version every few years; but why do offices keep buying it.

[1] - https://products.office.com/en-gb/buy/office [2] - https://deals.dell.com/en-uk/productdetail/2sue

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#376

Post by Torwald »

dividido wrote: post #367

I write enterprise software for fortune 100 companies. If I put myself in the user’s shoes and had an alternative, I’d most likely uninstall what we built and jump ship. But they can’t. It’s an internal app and the user is forced to use it. I try and fight for what’s right but if I had a dollar everytime I heard “ we aren’t google/amazon” , “only xx people will use it”, “we are just doing this to get off the old tech…

> UX isn’t valued

Good UX drives costs down for training and draining of human capital. That should be the pitch.

Next question, who in the fortune 100 should hear that pitch?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#377

Post by ineedasername »

kd0amg wrote: post #241
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?

Administrators use it for data analysis on course usage, trend analysis in course performance, and other groups also us it for some types of financial transactions. None of it's great, most of it is minimally adequate.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#378

Post by johannes1234321 »

> It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions.

Hear hear!

I often put it this way: Enterprise software is sold by having the CIO/CEO playing a round of golf with the sales person.

The CIO/CEO never have to use the software. They have assistants extracting the relevant figures etc.

(For context: I interpret "administrators" not as sysadmin but administrative staff)

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#379

Post by spamizbad »

kragen wrote: post #80
Tsarbomb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis. The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.…

> 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.

There's a company in my building that outfitted their team with $30K+ HP Z series workstations with 256GB of RAM... to run Microsoft Excel 2016.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#380

Post by cnst »

MarcScott wrote: post #364

I worked at a school that used the Frog VLE. There was a big push for us to use it for student assessment. I tried, I honestly did. 1. I used it to set homework assignments. 2. .py files were blocked and students couldn't upload them. 3. They submitted code as .txt instead. 4. I'd click on my class to view submissions, it showed the top 5 submissions. 5. I'd click on a submission and it would download. 6. I'd view th…

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom".

The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used.

Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too!)

At SXSW, there was a coffee-bot vendor. They didn't bother testing with an adequate number of folks, so, the whole thing overflowed on first day. Predictable? Yes. Would be noticed by a committee? Not a chance.

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