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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#21

This is changing though. A fair number of solutions such as Slack are easy enough to use and get a hold of that teams within large enterprises can simply start using them.

Simple consumer friendly products have a tendency to get more and more complicated as they try to expand their market into the enterprise. The question is not whether Slack is simple now, but whether it will still be simple in 3-5 years.

Of course, Slack already isn't that simple. The authentication model seems insane, and no one can ever explain it to me when I ask.

It's nice that me@gmail.com and me@corporate.com can be logged into different slacks in the same electron app, but why do I have different accounts/passwords for me@gmail.com for different slacks? It's all the pain of federation without any clear benefits.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#22
This is very true but also very well understood. Marc Benioff is selling to C-level execs who will probably never use the Salesforce software themselves. Same reason why Phil Mickleson is the spokesman for Workday. The people making multimillion dollar purchase decisions are playing golf and watching CNBC not sitting in a cubicle wondering why the software sucks.

This is the exact reason why I'm skeptical about Slack's future and why I think the stock is going to be troubled for a while. It's a rare enterprise software product that's beloved by the people who use it and to my knowledge doesn't do the same kind of lengthy multi-month/year "take clients out for steak" sales cycle. It seems to rely heavily on upward pressure from employees to gain traction. I'm not convinced that that strategy is going to be super effective, especially competing with Microsoft who already has massive enterprise sales teams with well-developed relationships with the types of people who make purchasing decisions.

Ben Thompson wrote a great piece a few months ago on why GCP is facing similar difficulties gaining traction in the enterprise.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#23
Sure, this is true, but it's a totally unoriginal thought:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/669-why-enterprise-software-s...

https://medium.com/@jeffbrydon/why-most-enterprise-software-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v9y55/do_you_...

It took me three seconds to find those by Googling "Why enterprise software sucks". I worked in enterprise software for a decade, and I've heard a thousand versions of this.

It's easy to complain about stuff. It's even easier to repeat complaints that have been made hundreds of times already. It's hard to find solutions. This guy doesn't deserve any credit for reiterating old complaints without any hint of how to fix the stuff he's complaining about.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. Whoever buys it usually checks off a list of features that it needs, but has no idea if it does any of those things particularly well.

I've seen this with mobile phones in the 90's-2000's. Until Apple came up with the iPhone designed for the end users, the phones' buyers were the networks, not the end users. The same goes for companies like LinkedIn - they are now driven by recruiters and not the end users. Thus the idiotic interface and functionality changes that basically makes it unusable [to the most of the users].

That's because the recruiters are the users, and professionals are just the product that LinkedIn sells.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#26
While I was at university, they installed a system called It's learning. It gave you basically a forum per class and a way of handing in assignments. It was basic, but broken in many ways (like a rich text editor that only worked on IE - meaning I couldn't actually send messages from my Mac; in 2006), and everyone agreed that the only thing it had over the custom system that came before was looks. I think for a long while part of the old system even had to be embedded, because It's learning didn't provide all the features.

What it did have, though, was a lot of nice videos presenting it. This was extremely high tech at the time, and quite likely to woo the people buying it... maybe they felt they didn't even have to try it, because they'd seen video demos.

AFAIK it's been replaced twice in 15 years. So yeah.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#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 experienced (in the future, by others, elsewhere), unperceived.

Nonmanifest problems are a substantial class of hard or big problems. Things which are outside your own experience, or the experience of administrators, managers, judges, or executives (in the broadest senses of the words) are really, really hard to understand, grasp, or appreciate.

(This is a key argument for diversity, real diversity, of experience and background on your team(s).)

Two specific examples, both trivial, though illustrative, come to mind. One was a flyover-state hotel I'd stayed at recently during a road trip. There were numerous obvious design flaws of the building, ranging from the entrance (no way to get a wheeled luggage trolly up the steps) to the interior layout (lack of lifts, floor plan) which strongly suggested some architect and design committee who'd never visited the site having designed the facility.

Another was a pool party years ago at which a guest suddently exclaimed that something had touched them, under the water. Nothing was visible. Then a second and third made the same comment. The culprit? A clear plastic drinks tumbler, which would oscilate when touched, given the mass of the water it moved against, giving a lifelike contact response, but being all but invisible in the pool itself. Until directly experienced, and ultimately revealed, the effect was difficult to credit.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#29

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…

I would say yes and no.

It's true that enterprises have complex and unique workflows, and that this drives the complexity of enterprise software. What I doubt is that this complexity is actually adding value in most cases.

There is a nice equilibrium where companies adopt simple best practice workflows for non-core competencies, and vendors compete on how effectively they can implement those simple workflows.

In reality, we're stuck in the equilibrium where companies cling to baroque workflows for everything, and vendors compete to support those workflows, sacrificing ease of use, implementation time, and agility.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. Whoever buys it usually checks off a list of features that it needs, but has no idea if it does any of those things particularly well.

I've seen this with mobile phones in the 90's-2000's. Until Apple came up with the iPhone designed for the end users, the phones' buyers were the networks, not the end users. The same goes for companies like LinkedIn - they are now driven by recruiters and not the end users. Thus the idiotic interface and functionality changes that basically makes it unusable [to the most of the users].

I thought the recruiters were the end users and the rest of us were the product.
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