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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#381

Post by TeMPOraL »

ridaj wrote: post #356
tw04 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. The iPhone took almost a decade to get to the appropriate functionality. The part you're leaving out is most executives just ended up carrying two devices and whined to IT about "why can't YOU make my iphone as good at email as my bl…

> Except I can count on one hand the number of fortune 500 enterprises that moved to gsuite over o365. That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer. > This reads like someone who lives in the valley and thinks the valley is in any way reflective of corporate America. I don't live in that valley, and I fully know that it doesn't reflect the rest of…

> That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer.

But it is. That and useful features. Both of which Office has, and GSuite has not.

I don't remember the name of that "Word lite" program that was included with Windows for free around Vista/7, which could open less sophisticated .doc files and was a default binding for .rtf files. But compared to Microsoft Office, GSuite is like that program, but on the web.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#382

Post by scarface74 »

spamizbad wrote: post #371
gertrunde wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet neither Android nor iPhone today as as good at doing email as Blackberry was 10 years ago. They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.

I always thought their killer feature was the fact that they'd operate on pager frequencies, so you could get an email (or at least a portion of it) in what was quite often a cellular deadzone. Largely moot these days between the proliferation of WiFi and LTE repeaters.

The BlackBerry phones didn’t operate on pager frequencies did they?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#383

Post by pbhjpbhj »

airstrike wrote: post #83
jasode wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. I'd refine your examples somewhat. The author's idea of "enterprise software" would be more like SAP/Salesforce/JIRA. A client-server model type of software (data lives in big central corporate databases) instead of being documents-oriented (user data lives in files like .xlsx, .docx, .psd). In contrast, the other desktop software of Photoshop/Word/Excel is often bought…

In the workplace, people like using MS Excel because the alternatives are ridiculously inferior

Many people don't need complex features of Excel, LibreOffice is pretty good. Many people have Excel and don't even get to basic functions like vlookup, nevermind anything that is actually lacking from other applications.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#384

Post by adontz »

Torwald wrote: post #376
dividido wrote: post #367

I write enterprise software for fortune 100 companies. If I put myself in the user’s shoes and had an alternative, I’d most likely uninstall what we built and jump ship. But they can’t. It’s an internal app and the user is forced to use it. I try and fight for what’s right but if I had a dollar everytime I heard “ we aren’t google/amazon” , “only xx people will use it”, “we are just doing this to get off the old tech…

> 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?

HR? But if it is not about some harassment, nobody cares what HR says.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#385

Post by entropicdrifter »

Torwald wrote: post #376
dividido wrote: post #367

I write enterprise software for fortune 100 companies. If I put myself in the user’s shoes and had an alternative, I’d most likely uninstall what we built and jump ship. But they can’t. It’s an internal app and the user is forced to use it. I try and fight for what’s right but if I had a dollar everytime I heard “ we aren’t google/amazon” , “only xx people will use it”, “we are just doing this to get off the old tech…

> 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?

As someone who wrote internal software for a fortune 100, probably all of them. EDIT: When I first read your question, I thought you meant 'which companies?', now I realize you're asking who to talk to within a given corp. The answer to that probably boils down to 'whoever is getting bribed with kickbacks from enterprise software makers'

The people who set the requirements for my biggest project tried to massively expand them about 2 weeks before the end of the project, then tried to bury it after we instead focused on polishing UX and debugging for those 2 weeks. Several years later I hear it's still in use internally and the users refuse to migrate to a third party solution despite pressure from execs who probably want kickbacks.

Giant corps have no idea what the difference is between usability and number of features.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#386

Post by wayoutthere »

bryanmgreen wrote: post #245
ridaj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

As someone who is building a B2B SAAS company and made the decision to not focus on large-enterprise, I think you're both right. At the end of the day, it's just plain hard to create a clean effective product that can be used by 5,000+ person organizations. Regardless of use-case, boatloads of data will be collected in large-enterprise software and it has to be transferred and presented to many end-users in a clear w…

I think a lot of SaaS companies end up failing fast when they focus on the enterprise. The sales cycle is longer, and having a massive client can end up putting their individual needs over features that would make the product more attractive to the market as a whole.

SaaS makes the most money when users can self-service in large numbers at relatively low transaction costs, which typically means SMB should be your first market. The enterprise channel is where you go only once you have a mature product and a healthy revenue base to do the enterprise payola scheme with consulting companies.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#387

Post by epberry »

dmix wrote: post #142
xivzgrev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense. Given my experience in tech startup land, im going to take a stab at how this happens from inside the company. Lets say you are starting sn enterprise saas company, woohoo! You have your initial product and customers love it, yes! Things are starting to hum along nicely. Now your sales people are identiying new markets and saying “hey if we add feature x and y, we can make $x million more per year f…

A lot of SaaS businesses aren’t really SaaS, they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers. That’s not a great business to run though as it’s very difficult to scale. Far too many fall into the trap of saying yes to the first BigCo that comes by early on because they need the $$. While they neglect every other niche and business where it could fit like a glove. Or more often doesn’t even…

Are SaaS businesses really customizing for high paying customers? They may build new features which are then made available to other businesses but I would be surprised if there are separate source trees.

The other issue is that a "great business" and "scale" are not synonymous. In fact many of the current batch of companies of great scale, like Slack, have spent enormous amounts of money to get there, and still lose money after becoming public. Then you have a company like Atlassian, with a confounding mix of enterprise products that are hard to use: but a fantastic businesses that's been profitable since the very beginning.

I do agree with you that the APIs, webhooks, and Zapier integrations solve the problem of customization, although I'd still say it's less customization and more a bevy of options.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#388

Post by TeMPOraL »

ridaj wrote: post #152
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…

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

You're confusing "checklist-driven development" with developing needed features. I'm guessing because you assume that the features actually work. The problem of enterprise software is less that the features are unnecessary, and more that they work only on paper, but not in the real world. Since the software is sold to people who aren't using it, they can't evaluate the actual implementation and usability - so what gets sold is garbage that meets criteria.

Now what I see you arguing for is not "consumerization of IT", but infantilization of IT. Modern UX is oriented about dumbing down software, removing necessary features because they're "unused"[0], and about a myth that you can eliminate training time. Which is why people - again, not the users - buy into it. The sales strategy is: put it in the cloud, ask for subscription while screaming "it's OPEX and not CAPEX", and remove any and all features so everything looks slick on the demo, and the problem only becomes apparent when somebody tries to actually do something with it.

And then actual users have to suffer. For as much as software is eating the world, I wonder how much actual, hard productivity does the modern software of the web cost, compared to the software it displaced.

--

[0] - The way "data-driven" approach would tell you that there's no point adding airbags to cars, since almost nobody uses them ever.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#389

Post by taurath »

I worked in this industry with blackboard, making something similar. The truth is that the school administrators hold the purse strings. They also don't actually have very much money to begin with - margins are tighter because your price per user is much lower than most business to business end-user systems.

The users absolutely want features. And you hear about them. Its the joy of the developers working on it to actually deliver it to them. But the admins don't care. They don't want user-level features and ease of use. They want reports. Lots of reports. They want a system that will generate a report on anything, in exactly the format and UX that they desire, ad hoc. And then they want it to be customizable in every way possible. This is where the majority of work goes, because the people with the purse strings demand it. If they demanded a better UX, they'd get it, and the developers working on it would be MUCH happier. We had one of the "better" UX's but it got older, and work couldn't be prioritized onto it.

So really, the parent definitely rings true to me. The incentives from the "buyers" is NEVER about a good UX. Its an afterthought. Maybe if the buyers were more accountable to those having to use it this would change.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#390

Post by taurath »

Torwald wrote: post #376
dividido wrote: post #367

I write enterprise software for fortune 100 companies. If I put myself in the user’s shoes and had an alternative, I’d most likely uninstall what we built and jump ship. But they can’t. It’s an internal app and the user is forced to use it. I try and fight for what’s right but if I had a dollar everytime I heard “ we aren’t google/amazon” , “only xx people will use it”, “we are just doing this to get off the old tech…

> 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?

Training is already a line item and comes with the cost of the software. "Good" or "easy" training isn't valued as compared to the feature checklist, and it never will be. Unless the buyers of the software are accountable to the users of it, not the other way around, nothing will change.
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