Why Enterprise Software Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#221

Post by juped » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

probablybroken wrote: post #67

Tsarbomb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a workshop at the google office in Toronto a while back, and people asked when Google sheets would be able to perform big data analysis. The presenter looked confused, and then the group asking the question clarified that their big data workflow involves loading millions and millions of records into excel and they would have trouble migrating to google cloud until google sheets could match excel in performance.…

That's really strange... I always found Excel to perform dreadfully on data sets with even just hundreds of thousands of rows - it was always easier to just load the data into a database, or manipulate it with a script.

That's because you don't know how to use Excel (this isn't a knock on you, no one ever tells people how to use Excel). Excel sheets have a hard row limit of around a million rows, but long before you approach that you will have moved your data into the "Data Model", which is a relational table engine stapled on to Excel, or to some other backend which you will query from Excel (often via the Data Model).

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#222

Post by octorian » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

"The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do."

This is also why I've often said software built under government contract sucks and has terrible UI/UX, and why I'm glad I no longer work in that industry.

The moment you separate "customer" from "user", you end up building software for some senior paper-pusher who is just trying to check all the boxes on a requirements checklist. And guess what? "The software shall have a quality user experience" is not something that can be included in said list of requirements.

And in this environment, most developers even think their job is to "build software that satisfies all the requirements" to the point that they're completely oblivious to all those other concerns that would be downright mandatory if the software was sold to the end-user.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#223

Post by Goladus » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #212

shadowgovt wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when the enterprise software authors want to capture 100% of the marketplace, they are, of course, writing their offering to support those few specific industries. ... which adds features to the product as a whole, which other customers will need to be aware of and might take advantage of.

Heck, even within my niche corner of the enterprise world (coincidentally a similar niche as Blackboard), there's always a noisy client who demands X. I can make all the good-faith arguments about why X really isn't needed, but if that client is threatening to go to a different vendor or sue, X is getting built. As a developer, there's only so much I can do before an account executive or C-suite tells me to quite bit…

Despite what it seems, demand for features is really NOT why enterprise software is (so often) bad. The problem is how easy it is to SELL fundamentally bad software simply because you can tick a box saying it has the feature.

Yes, I too have seen the phenomenon of having too many people demanding features where the result turns out to be an incoherent mess. But I also know that if the massive amount of time and money that had been spent purchasing a box-ticking Enterprise Software Solution and subsequently hammering the awkward, unwieldy platform into some semblance of working order had been spent instead on direct improvements to the existing workflow software, then everyone would have been much more satisfied. And yeah I know I shouldn't speak hypothetically but you'll just have to decide to trust me on this or not.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#224

Post by investinme » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #216

yiyus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ImageMagick is great, I use it all the time. Photoshop is superb for interactive image editing, but if you need to crop a thousand images, change brightness, add some text on top, and merge them one next to the other, for example, and you need to do this every day, a sciptable tool is essential, and I really appreciate having all the power of Unix instead of a limited environment that requires a huge platform.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a programming-by-demonstration system that lets you interactively develop a filter on one image, then apply it to many images?

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.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#225

Post by realusername » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

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.

That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#226

Post by pfranz » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:12 PM UTC

mjlee wrote: post #7

I'm not sure where this originates from, but the most succinct definition I've heard for "Enterprise Software" is that the person who pays for it isn't the person who uses it.

I've heard you're saying and I think it's succinct, but a simplification of what's talked about in the post.

My example is when looking at daycare for my kid. They all boast about this app the teachers use to take pictures, update about their day, what they ate, when they went to the bathroom. In practice, each some teachers did it more than others, some none at all. When I would watch them, they'd be taking pictures with their iPads and spending time filling things out in lieu of other duties like watching the kids (although, most updates came during nap time after they had tidied up).

It pitches really well, but not quite necessary, and is often a huge time suck. I often still ask questions that app could answer (when did they have an accident, what happened? Did they eat all of their lunch? Did they nap today?) but I don't need a tedious record, just an occasional checkin.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#227

Post by zerkten » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:12 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #29

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…

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 real…

> 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.

Enterprises are setup to support all of these baroque workflows and that's where most of the value is derived. However users and the business don't get that value, and the project to replace the previous one will deliver "value" to IT stakeholders. The cycle repeats.

You have enterprise architects who in the worst case are creating uncertainty by supporting different factions and introducing new tools which interest them versus meeting goals for the company. IT outsourcing vendors are responsible for the implementation and frequently do a less than stellar job. Security are split between trying to keep tabs on how the outsourcer is running things, while trying to limit how much damage business areas do by just delivering their own solution with SaaS or a small vendor. This is a real mess that requires huge amounts of energy, and is hard to fix because everyone is doing pretty well from it in their own way.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#228

Post by blantonl » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #147

ocfnash wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone even uses it at all! I have a friend who works in a sales role for IBM. He told me that part of his bonus is contingent on being able to prove that the customer has actually installed the software which they bought. The policy apparently arose because certain public sector entities had refused to consider new deals since they still hadn't got round to installing the software for which they had paid millions…

I’d bet good money Watson got sold to a bunch of companies who wanted “AI” then they didn’t do anything useful with it. It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it. Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion…

I'm almost certain that Watson was a series of Python and Prolog "scripts" that were packaged together with big black boxes, blue lights, tagged as AI, and run through the IBM sales and marketing machine.

The result was huge margins for IBM and customers scratching their heads afterwards.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#229

Post by Mathnerd314 » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #169

bhauer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same reaction. I was wondering, "Since when are Word, Excel, and Photoshop enterprise software?" I've been using these as consumer desktop software for decades. That said, I do agree with GP that enterprise software is complex because it's designed to be adaptable to existing processes, whereas simpler software seeks to adapt the user to its prescribed process. And even without being an enterprise, I often…

> Since when are Word, Excel [...] enterprise software? Since Word 1.0. Why do you think it is called Microsoft Office ? The 1989 edition of Microsoft Word cost $500, equivalent to over $1,000 today, for a single seat. That's not consumer software. Microsoft Home didn't exist until 1993, a decade into Office's life, when it had achieved complete enterprise dominance -- thanks largely to its competitors' failure to re…

A decent computer was $3,000, or 6x the price of MS Word: https://www.zdnet.com/article/1991s-pc-technology-was-unbeli... Today Office is $150, and decent computers are still in the 6x/$900 range.

The shift was in computers, from enterprise to consumer, and the software followed.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#230

Post by IshKebab » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

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…

This gets it right in my experience. I worked at a company that used Siemens Teamcenter. It's awful awful software, based on Eclipse but somehow even slower. Everybody hated it.

I once put a slightly sarcastic comment on an internal wiki about it being rubbish (literally everyone know this), and to my surprise got told off by some purchasing manager somewhere - I wasn't allowed to criticise Teamcenter because some important people higher up had made the decision to buy it.

The fundamental problem with enterprise software is that the buyers are not the users. Why would you care about usability if the people you are selling your software to never use it?