No one here has mentioned the open source alternatives: Mahara and Moodle.
Why Enterprise Software Sucks
541–550 of 570 posts
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I 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. No, that's not it. Take something like filing taxes. The tax laws are very arcane and convoluted. And yet…
Turbo tax is a consumer product and is optimized for that. Selling Turbotax to an enterprise will yield very different results
I think that this hits the nail on the head. That often the bulk of the people who use enterprise software are not the true end-user.
Think of Salesforce which people who use it complain about daily. The end-users are actually all the people who get the reporting and sales management out of Salesforce. They love it as a tool. The sales people are only data entry people... Therefore its optimized towards the true end-users.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Photoshop actually has that. They are called Actions (basically macros). You can select a group of operations you did in your editing history and turn them into an Action, with parametrization support. You can then batch apply an Action to a bunch of files.
Nice! I don't know if this is new since I last used it or if I just didn't know about it.
I imagine photoshop has had it for a long time. I do raw photography very sparingly and barely know photoshop. Literally one of the first thing I wanted to do was batch operations on a set of photos in which the lighting and camera setting were exactly the same. A quick Google revealed it is frequently used.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy. I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside fro…
How is vim significantly less unix like than vi? The user interfaces are near identical and vi is very unix in philosophy and originated on unix.
EMACS was the extensible, customizable, self-documenting display editor, that did hairy things like turn your compiler error messages into hypertext and syntax-highlight your code—a massive amount of functionality tied up in a single garbage-collected process with an embedded scripting language, with potentially hundreds of files open at once. It came from ITS and Multics, where it provided not only an IDE but windows, on text terminals. It inhabited Unix systems uneasily, like the giant flying saucer in Independence Day, provoking complaints from co-workers that you were hogging megabytes of memory and making the VAX slow.
vi, by contrast, was just a display editor. If you wanted to refill a paragraph in your email, you typed !}fmt to pipe it to fmt, an external process. To reformat a block of C, you could use !%indent. (And you could map a key to this as a keyboard macro.) If you wanted to script some editing, you might emit an ex or ed script, probably from a shell script. If you wanted to concurrently edit a second file, you would start a separate vi process. You could run it on a PDP-11, where no process could exceed 64K. Unix philosophy: tiny tools, loosely coupled—though vi was a bit on the fat side in order to get WYSIWYG instantly responsive editing like Bravo, Smalltalk, or EMACS.
Vim is an extensible, customizable, self-documenting display editor, that does hairy things like turning your compiler error messages into hypertext and syntax-highlighting your code—a massive amount of functionality tied up in a single garbage-collected process with many embedded scripting languages, with potentially hundreds of files open at once, using megabytes of memory. If you want to refill a paragraph in Vim, you probably type gq}, which invokes Vim’s internal paragraph-filling code, not an external process. It uses the vi command set, with enhancements, but not the vi design.
Not that that's a bad thing. I greatly prefer Vim to vi. I've been using EMACS since 1990 or so and vi and Vim since 1996—I couldn't afford to wait 30 seconds for EMACS to load over NFS on my SPARC 5 every time I wanted to reply to a mail.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Maybe the world has changed now, but around 2006/2007 I was an embedded software engineer for a company that built public transport smart-card ticketing systems. I was working on a device that sat on a bus, operated by the driver. It had a monochrome screen with something like 640x480 resolution and around 16 or 18 buttons. One of the things the bus drivers needed to do was to sell tickets, but the number of buttons…
You have to careful with this. Things that sound like good ideas to the programmer can often be bad ideas for the user.
Case in point: a customer (we do embedded design services) came to us to redesign a manufacturing tool and mentioned that it was used both in the US and Costa Rica. We suggested adding Spanish language screens because, well, it lets more people in Costa Rica use the device.
Problem was, the users pushed back because knowing English got them more money and they could be replaced by cheaper Spanish-only speaking people if we added the translations.
To the point of making money on the ECO's, the problem is that if all your competition is structuring their bids this way, then you have to do the same if you're to have a hope of winnning anything.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the first ones used pager networks, the next generation used cellular. The push service was quite good IMHO. Every carrier that supported BlackBerry Internet Service had a leased line or VPN to the RIM NOCs. The phones would connect to BIS servers at the carrier which then communicated over these backhauls to RIM. Because it was all so deeply integrated in the carriers network (I believe the BIS servers acted as a…
This sounds worse than modern ActiveSync - which Apple introduces support for in 2010 (2009?). You also didn’t have to send all of your email through BlackBerry’s servers. With ActiveSync, my email will usually reach my phone/cellular watch/iPad before it reaches my computer.
True. The messages were encrypted, but ye if RIM went down, no email for you. Even if your email server was working fine.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice! I don't know if this is new since I last used it or if I just didn't know about it.
I imagine photoshop has had it for a long time. I do raw photography very sparingly and barely know photoshop. Literally one of the first thing I wanted to do was batch operations on a set of photos in which the lighting and camera setting were exactly the same. A quick Google revealed it is frequently used.
Photoshop hasn't even existed for a long time yet.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience: - lack of forwards compatibility. When someone sends you an Excel 2016 file and you’re stuck on Excel 2013 because your corporate hasn’t upgraded yet, it’s a total PITA. - weird bugs. Sometimes spreadsheets can get corrupted in weird ways so that they crash Excel and there’s nothing you can…
You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version.
It’s not new features. Sometimes for no particular reason, a sheet which uses no new features isn’t backwards compatible.
In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? There’s no need to put magnets in baby clothing, and there is some risk to doing so. Why do it then? 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...
It's the histrionic piety that's the problem, not the particulars of the facts. It's in the context of watching parents killing themselves to prove to other parents how their children are their sole focus in life, and that anyone who would do less is an unworthy parent. It's evident in an argument of the form "we wouldn't think of X," wherein compromise is simply declared out of bounds of any possible discussion. Pri…
Well, the good news is that you've completely misunderstood my comment. There's no histrionics, nor piety. I don't care what other people do for their kids (I said this elsewhere in the thread), and I can imagine that other people, especially people with disabilities, might find the magnets to a useful option. But for me, zippers are easy and work just fine. Therefore there's no need to take even a small risk to replace something that works just fine.
Another consideration is the flood of cheap counterfeits on Amazon (commingled at times), which means that you can't actually trust that the item you purchase is the genuine article (i.e., that it's as well-built as the descriptions say). So
I'm not sure what snowplow/helicopter parenting has to do with any of this, but I'm right there with you that people do too much of that.
If anyone out there decides not to have kids because I don't buy baby clothes with magnets, I think they care too much about what other people do (with their own babies).
Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. I’ll do YOU one better. I work in an industry where software is still created by good, old-fashioned, by-the-book waterfall process, by outsourced developers. You know: the industry-proven, rock-solid, 20-year-out-of-date, slowest-and-least-agile methodology. Not only do the p…
I find it hard to understand how a business like this stays alive. Really, how?