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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#391

Post by beat »

Torwald wrote: post #376
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?

You're assuming that the cost of human capital actually matters in big corporations. As someone who has worked for several Fortune 100s and a couple of government agencies, I assure you, that is not the case. Employee time is treated as having no value, and things that damage the efficiency of employees are not relevant.

I once saw a "cost saving" round prohibit our team's QA engineer from getting a new SoapUI license (we were supporting an API!). It took three five-person meetings to get official approval to buy a $100 license - at a human capital cost of thousands of dollars. Not an eye was blinked at this absurdity.

Along the same lines, I once saw a lead architect go through the same nonsense to get a $100 Adobe Acrobat license (at a government agency). He said to me "It's easier for me to spend $100,000 dollars than to spend $100". He could have asked for a couple of new heavy-duty Unix servers with Oracle, and gotten it approved easily. But Adobe Acrobat? No, that's waste!

See also "bikeshedding".

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#392

Post by robocat »

vfc1 wrote: post #9

Pretty true. For example, some of the worst applications I have ever used are by far timesheet applications. It's a product with a completely captive audience, that cannot go to the competition. If you don't fill your timesheet, you don't get paid its that simple. Typically these are either built-in house, or are an expensive third party product with terrible usability, bought by managers who might not even have to u…

Timesheets turn out to be a very complicated product.

1. integration with accounting and payroll systems is mostly tragically difficult (and excruciatingly boring).

2. companies have wildly different needs for data entry and validation.

3. Unions in particular create fiendishly complex requirements for hours etc.

4. A captive audience means you can't drop "problem" users, and you do need to support outdated browsers and devices.

5. Timesheets need to be reviewed, revised, authorised. There needs to be a solution for when the manager is on holiday.

... And so on for another 20 items that are similarly complicated.

Timesheets are a great example of something that most people have used and think they understand (and I've seen software devs build a product for) but it turns out to be a far far harder problem than it appears.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#393

Post by TeMPOraL »

lmm wrote: post #264
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…

> 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.…

Related, my co-worker and I have evaluated a dozen different tools big and small, including Jira and that Jetbrains thing. And we still can't find a system that would meet our needs, which I think are simple:

- Model tasks as DAGs, not as lists. I.e. I want to work with a dependency graph (JetBrains thing sort of can do that with task relationships, but the UI isn't oriented towards exploiting it).

- If that's too much to ask, at least allow to nest arbitrary amount of subtasks, and not just one (like Jira and almost everyone else).

- Fast.

- Proper keyboard shortcuts (again, JetBrains is good at it, but it's missing some crucial shortcuts and UI concepts, like "add a subtask to current task" and "go back to parent task").

- Allow estimating how long the task will take, without having to specify when it'll start.

- Render a proper GAANT chart and do a critical path analysis.

I really think I'm not asking for much, and yet nothing I've seen can do it. Most Jira-like systems try hard to be "agile", which means sacrificing features and utility to chase misguided ideological purity (like the whole "no subtask" thing).

Seriously, if Emacs had a first-class support for real-time collaboration, Org Mode would be vastly better than all task management offerings on the market.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#394

Post by rsj_hn »

I think the main point is simple economics. Software is all fixed costs, the costs of making a copy are zero.

So let's say you are making enterprise software, if your market is 1000 companies, you will sell at most 1000 copies. If you charge $100,000 per copy, you will generate at most $100 million if you capture 100% of the market. That's the world of enterprise software.

If you are making consumer software, your target audience is 3 Billion. If you charge $10 and capture the whole market, you will make $30 Billion.

What that means is that compared to consumer software, enterprise software is incredibly expensive while also having 1/300th of the development budget to build the product.

Corollary 1: Enterprise software will never win head to head versus consumer software, and firms will use consumer software whenever possible.

Corollary 2: Given the small dev budgets, Enterprise software will skimp on all non-necessary aspects of development to meet the minimum viable product standards before they can ship. This is why your corporate accounting software package has a terrible UI but it has the required functionality and uptime.

Corollary 3: while consumer software often can fix bugs and roll out patches on a monthly basis for free, enterprise software will fix bugs with delays in years and only with expensive support contracts.

Corollary 4: Enterprise software is both highly customized and highly rigid. Highly customized in that a lot of Enterprise software development is bespoke for a few key customers because of Corollary 1, and highly rigid in that Corollary 3 means you are stuck with whatever they deliver.

I remember for a while, Cisco had a branch for each major customer. Imagine maintaining hundreds of branches in your code base.

Once you understand the basic economics of the thing, you no longer have to ascribe ill will, incompetence, or ignorance to any actor. It's just "you get what you pay for" and "no one can do miracles" in a product which is all fixed cost.

With those broad facts in mind, most aspects of enterprise software become obvious. I really don't think issues like "someone else buys it, not the user" make much difference. After all, parents buy lots of consumer software for their kids (games) which are amazing and incredibly polished.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#396

Post by shinjitsu »

cnst wrote: post #380
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…

> Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature.

It should be - but for many school IT security types it really is a feature to limit file types

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#397

Post by goatherders »

Loved this thread but none of this is new. I dont know anyone that likes SAP, Netsuite, Etc. But that doesnt matter. Big companies make decisions to minimize risk and stay on the right side of the law and compliance issues. If the user(s) are miserable and wasting tons of time, no one cares because the company is protected.

I am interested to see if today's new productivity apps (Notion, Trello, Slack) end up in the same vortex of hell as the enterprise tempts them more and more.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#398

Post by cynoclast »

A friend of mine calls this stuff "mandatoryware" because it doesn't matter how much the end users hate it, the company requires it. So it can be as shitty as you can possibly imagine and will still be used daily by potentially thousands of people because it's simply mandated.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#399

Post by dfox »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #54
fasicle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them.

Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.

Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains en_US syntax), but this difference is even in the format of CSV files processed by excel (there is significant portion of the world, where the C in CSV stands for semiColon, as far as excel is concerned)
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