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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#111

Post by bzbarsky »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #36

> "OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can't easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on… checklists of features. ️" Former Blackboarder here with +50 implementations in 4 years. Blackboard and its main competitors -- specially the best ones -- are extrem…

I know a number of college professors. Of the ones who have had to use Blackboard (always imposed from above; they are not being given a choice about adopting it), I have yet to meet one who likes it. They definitely do not perceive its UX as attractive in any way...

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#112

Post by curryst »

swiley wrote: post #49
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #38

Not sure about the generalization to enterprise software in general, but the critique of people choosing blackboard is spot on. Before selecting a tool, professors should always ask: "is this the tool that two recent graduates would choose without my intervention?". Because to use any other tool is to deprive your students of skills they'll likely need. Also: > Once profs and students put down the pitchforks, committ…

Every popular computer OS except android has an ssh client now. Just give the students and professors shells and have them put the documents in shared folders.

This is kind of a manifestation of this agency problem, though. We, presumably the people that would write this theoretical software, have a vastly different background than the people who will use the software (general students, not just CS students).

SSH is perfect for us; it's a well known and supported tool that's shared in countless other workflows. Can you imagine the struggles of an Art History student trying to submit a paper at 3am and getting a message back that host key verification failed? I suppose even before that, they would need to figure out navigation in SFTP. Or resort to a third-party GUI SFTP client; and the options that GUI will ask them for are probably bewildering. I can just hear them asking "What the fuck is a host/server? All they gave me is this stupid website, sftp-server.myuniversity.edu"

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#113

Post by maxerickson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #28

User-design indirection is a tremendous problem. It's a form of the principle-agent problem, or of what I've been noodling at under the general category of "manifestation", which is the idea that there are problems which are obvious and evident because they are manifest : immediately apparent, visible, obvious, observed, experienced, felt. And those which are not : nonapparent, invisible, non-obvious, unobserved, not…

Ironically, the tumbler is manifest and the design issues are vaguely not.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#115

Post by swalsh »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

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. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

Sometimes I wonder, what if we just fundamentally took a new approach the OS.

Today at the root of your operating system is the file system. It would be interesting if the file system was changed to essentially the concept of a simple object store. In much the same way we have "standard file formats" today, we could move to something like a "standard class". Objects would be a first class citizen in the OS. I think this becomes more interesting too if you start to ignore where the object lives. It doesn't matter if an object you care about is local, or on a server in your enterprises network, or if it's a thousand miles away.

The second big change, is I would do away with "applications". opting instead for a smaller unit of executable. Probably integrated with the object system. The idea here is you don't buy an entire system from a single vendor. You buy features from multiple vendors... and the design of the OS makes it really easy to integrate together. I guess this is kind of the unix philosophy... but maybe taken to the next level.

Thirdly, I think it would make sense if the system was natively "reactive", I think that would help with making aspect-oriented programming more normalized.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#116

Post by basseq »

Juliate wrote: post #81
freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

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. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

The thing is ... very few companies do actually use all the complex configuration of said purchased software. Rather, they are stuck with it. And deal with it, limiting the contact surface, until they cannot bear it anymore, and spend more to upgrade/get some consulting to have the solution reorganized for them. On one hand, you have purchase departments that are not the target users, and decide only based on paper r…

> The thing is ... very few companies do actually use all the complex configuration of said purchased software.

That's the point, though. Enterprise software is a superset (E) of all features that a large group of very diverse customers need.

An individual customer has a need for a much smaller set of features (C). That enterprise software may very well be the best software that includes all those needed features:

  C ⊆ E
There are niche providers, so a logical customer would select the software that meets all of their needs and as little else as possible. But there may not be a niche provider that meets that criteria. So as an individual customer, you may be stuck between an Enterprise software that meets all your needs, but is "more than you need" and a niche software that doesn't meet all your needs.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#117

Post by kfk »

This is missing the point. End users are clueless about what they need in a software solution. Take a sales pipeline, it's made of sales opportunities. Easy, right? Try to get 50 sales managers across various countries to agree on what a sales pipeline should be and do. I am sure Blackboard has the same issue. Enter consultants. They are not completely useless, they try to get those 50 managers above to agree on 1 idea and process. But depending on how much credibility and trust said consultants have accumulated with the company there is only x% of crap requirements they can say NO to. The x% of crap requirements they have to say YES to from those 50 people for lack of contractual power, credibility and trust is directly correlated to how much the final software solution will suck. And I am assuming the consultants here are good, assume an x multiplier for incompetence.

My point is: there is not enough focus on the business process and people aspect of things. A software solution is packaged consulting and best practices, nothing else. So if nobody is looking at the process and is able to dictate that 1 and 1 only process good luck building something that doesn't suck.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#119

Post by Kaiyou »

investinme wrote: post #70
freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

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. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

Nobody hates Photoshop. In fact it's one of the most loved software out there. I'm a developer and a Photoshop user and love it. The Unix philosophy would be a disaster for a image editing software (ImageMagick much?) Once a developer who spent all day in VIM & co was honestly arguing with me that Photoshop should be a command line app. I filled that under "shit developers say" and "delusional".

Personally, I yearn for a command line image editor. ImageMagick is nice, but it can't do everything. Once you've gone cli, it's hard to go back to gui applications, since they're so inefficient.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#120

Post by _pmf_ »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

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. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

SAP sucks companies dry.
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