Why Enterprise Software Sucks

Also, zippers take 3 seconds to do...if you don’t have 3 seconds to zip up the kid, you probably don’t have time to change the diaper underneath...

But can we talk about Twitter "essays", as I like to call them, for a minute?

As soon as I see someone chaining together 3-4-5+ (let alone) 10 tweets in a row, I immediately check out & hit the back button. That's not what Twitter is for.

It has a short character limit for a reason. It's meant for SMALL, quick thoughts. Things I can scroll through quickly, consume, and move on to the next bit in my feed. Not long, drawn out opinion pieces.

If you have that much to say, write a blog post about it. Write a post in a relevant sub-reddit. Send an OP-ed piece to your local newspaper for all I care. ANYTHING, buy try to make me follow your meandering, 10+ tweet long, stream of consciousness.

I admit I didn't read past the second tweet in the chain. I read enough to learn this twitter 'essay' was spurred by his college droping blackboard. I remember blackboard in college. It's was pretty mediocre but served it's purpose for it's time & place.

Anyway... I get the reason people do this. It's typically people with a lot of followers (like this guy, with 50 thousand) and they know this is the platform that will get the most reaction for whatever undeveloped, spur of the moment, rant they want to spew out.

Which is my point. Twitter is for undeveloped, spur of the moment rants. And if it spans more than two tweets, then tweeet us a link to your blog post. Or else don't get mad when I get distracted by comments in the third tweet, and go down a rabbit hole of shit talk before I make it to the end.

Well, sorry for the HN comments rant here. I got a little to angry I guess, but at least this is a place where long form comments are acceptable. Twitter is not.

It just feels so clunky. It feels very self-gratifying.

Part of my point is you typically only see this from folks who have a large amount of followers. Of which, a good percentage would be happy to click on a link to writing from someone they're ibterested in.

Seems like they are doing it because they enjoy the reaction from their follower base on the platform.

Don't make us try to follow a 1000 word thesis, in disjointed, 240 character increments... which might all have their own chain of comments.

Let us read the whole argument uninterrupted, & comment @ the end together. I'm only saying the platform isn't suited for long form ideas & discussion.

Again, sorry for ranting. Maybe I'm just in a mood tonight haha.

Call me cynical, but as I see it the complexity of the problem grows to fit the number of dollars available. If it's a large organisation they will invariably choose something that takes a colossal number of people to install and maintain it.

I've seen this as a person who designed and built cash registers. Supermarkets selling 10's of thousands of products can only tolerate a limited amount of complexity - so they have the simplest systems. Liquor markets has less products, and so they start branching out into weird pricing scheme (eg, mixed dozen of certain wines - something a supermarket would never contemplate). Go to a restaurant and limited products, and hell even McDonald's will even create a product especially for you on the spot - how many patties would you like on that quarter pounder Sir? A regular restaurant creates the most insane products you've ever seen - how would like it cooked, what sauce, kids meal, and even "which of the items on this bill will your friend be paying for?"

You could argue this complexity does help sales in some way. Bureaucracies are special they add totally unnecessary complex to justify their existence. So the article gets it right in one way: in order to justify that ongoing money in people needed to maintain it they need a product that cost a lot, and so justify that it needs to have a lot ticked boxes. It is in the products makers interest to make the task seem as complex and yet attractive as possible.

Or to put it another way, a big organisation invariably consists of a number bureaucratic fiefdoms whose evolutionary imperative is to make themselves indispensable as possible by ensuring their is work that must be done by them in order for the corporation to function. They are constantly trying to grab work from each other in a dog eat dog world. The worst at it get eaten by the best.

I recently saw this first hand. An organisation is installing SAP for payroll. It's taken a team of 10 or 20 3 years so far, and it's not done. Hmm, I thought, they must be big. Nope - turns out they have a total of two offices. I could write a system that serves the payroll needs of 200 people in 2 to 3 years, and it would be customised to their exact way of operating and would only take one person to maintain it. So why SAP? They only reason I can see if a bureaucratic mandarin can pull getting it installed, he's got a guaranteed job managing 20 people for years with plenty of opportunity to grow it.

IT bureaucracies seem to be particularly cancerous. I suspect that is because most companies core competency isn't IT, yet reducing head office staff through automation depends on IT and everybody knows that. So IT can get away with more in the way of snow jobs than most.