Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Enterprise Software Sucks

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 570 posts

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#441

Post by msla »

codesections wrote: post #144

This is missing a big part of the dynamic. Much enterprise software is what Joel Spolsky describes as "internal software"[0]: > Internal software only has to work in one situation on one company’s computers.… Here usability is a lower priority, because a limited number of people need to use the software, and they don’t have any choice in the matter, and they will just have to deal with it. Speed of development is mor…

> This is missing a big part of the dynamic. Much enterprise software is what Joel Spolsky describes as "internal software"[0]:

> [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/

And these worlds change over time:

> Games are unique for two reasons. First, the economics of game development are hit-oriented. Some games are hits, many more games are failures, and if you want to make money on game software you recognize this and make sure that you have a portfolio of games so that the blockbuster hit makes up for the losses on the failures. This is more like movies than software.

> The bigger issue with the development of games is that there’s only one version. Once your users have played through Duke Nukem 3D, they are not going to upgrade to Duke Nukem 3.1D just to get some bug fixes and new weapons. With some exceptions, once somebody has played the game to the end, it’s boring to play it again. So games have the same quality requirements as embedded software and an incredible financial imperative to get it right the first time. Shrinkwrap developers have the luxury of knowing that if 1.0 doesn’t meet people’s needs and doesn’t sell, maybe 2.0 will.

The first part of that's kinda true, but DLC means the second part isn't. People will pay for what amounts to a point upgrade for game software.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#442

Post by x0x0 »

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…

I posit the BYO device went forward because enterprises realized they could make people pay for their own equipment.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#443

Post by TeMPOraL »

mbreese wrote: post #423
TeMPOraL wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too! Strongly seconding. It's an annoying UX antipattern, especially as it loses precision over time ("28 minutes ago" is fine, but "yesterday" or "5 days ago" or - even worse - "2 years ago" is not; having the date specified to hours or minutes is actually useful, especially in context of a site with international audience). Doubly so on HN, which doesn't even b…

I prefer the HN method of 28 min, yesterday, 2 hours ago, etc... for HN. The older a comment or post, the less relevant it is to a particular discussion. This site is for real-time discussions of articles, so it is optimized for that use-case. The older a comment, the less relevant it is towards the immediate discussion. Thus, older comments have less precision, because those details don't matter for the discussion.…

HN may be optimized for current discusions, but is also a repository of knowledge; I frequently land on years old threads from Google searches. For older times, an explicit ISO timestamp has at least two benefits: 1) I can compare it easily to other dates (e.g. is that comment older or more recent that event X, or software version Y), and 2) time of the day is a half-decent proxy for telling whether the US or Europe was awake then.

And while you can justify the inprecise stamp on HN, there's no excuse for GMail and a score of other messaging software doing the same. When I'm looking at the date of an old e-mail, I almost always need the exact date and time. "2 weeks ago" is useless. "2019-09-27 08:43" tells me it happened before work, on a day after an important meeting, etc.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#444

Post by NegativeLatency »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #432
MarcScott wrote: post #364

I worked at a school that used the Frog VLE. There was a big push for us to use it for student assessment. I tried, I honestly did. 1. I used it to set homework assignments. 2. .py files were blocked and students couldn't upload them. 3. They submitted code as .txt instead. 4. I'd click on my class to view submissions, it showed the top 5 submissions. 5. I'd click on a submission and it would download. 6. I'd view th…

I work in a corporate environment and I also write software -- both external and internal tools. My intolerance to unnecessary pain is one of the main driving forces in creating software-based tools. The amount of pain inflicted on employees by enterprise solutions of various kinds is immeasurable. As a developer, I squirm witnessing so much unnecessary work and discomfort associated with simple tasks. For example, e…

> managing expenses is so painful that employees consider not expending their spending

That's not a bug for some companies, who would prefer to not reimburse you.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#446

Post by madelyn »

shinjitsu wrote: post #396
cnst wrote: post #380

Earlier 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…

> Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. It should be - but for many school IT security types it really is a feature to limit file types

This reminds me how for awhile I was emailing myself .tar and .exe files through Gmail or school email systems by renaming them to .jpeg files.

Recent-ish (past year) Gmail patched this (for .tar at least), so I started using base64 encoded text files.

Now though I just pay for my own email service away from Google.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#447

Post by healsjnr1 »

rlucas wrote: post #429
true_religion wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did blackberry do so well in email?

For me and for a number of email "power users" whom I know, Blackberry strictly dominates iPhone email experience. Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer. But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setti…

I'm still pretty confused about what blackberry did well. It sounds like they had a workflow that people that liked it liked.

Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#448

Post by acd »

End users should use UX user interface first principle and code an open source alternative thats better. Ie gather enough frustrated end users and create something better.

Tools like Moqups or Balsamiq to create user interface prototypes by designers.Then open source is created from these prototypes.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#449

Post by amaccuish »

mbreese wrote: post #430
scarface74 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It wouldn't surprise me if the BB push notifications worked over pager frequencies. I can't find anything online about how they actually worked, but the original two-way communications device from RIM was called the "Inter@ctive Pager"[0]. If I were to guess, I'd say it is possible the push notification went over a pager frequency and included a snippet of the message. The device would then be able to request the ful…

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 Gateway GPRS Support Node), the BIS servers knew exactly where on the network each phone was, so they could send essentially a UDP packet directly to the device, which was listening on a particular port. No long standing TCP connections, and of course if the device didn't acknowledge messages, they were queued at RIM for when the device reentered coverage.

Email was provided by a server side process that opened MAPI (the original exchange RPC protocol) connections to exchange mailboxes and asked to be pinged if there were changes in mailboxes. When that happened, the BES server would pull the changes, package them, forward them to the RIM NOC over the proprietary SRP protocol, which would locate the right carrier, send the packet over the backhaul, and then from the carrier it would make its way to the phone.

Source: used to run a BES server

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#450

Post by mbesto »

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…

> 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 features that is making inroads in the market and generally works better for users. Slack is another proof point - the "consumerization of IT" trend in general.

O365 far exceed Gsuites market share and is generally better for users because most companies users still use the Outlook desktop client.

MS Teams exceeds Slacks market share. Team instant communication is a minor blip in the overall market for Enterprise software.

> Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX.

Having configuration that adopts to compliance and regulation is UX. The U in the UX is just not the end user but the admin user.

Consumerization of IT is absolutely a thing, but not for this is for productivity apps, not enterprise grade apps - you're conflating the two.

To pretend like all of the features demanded by enterprise middle and upper management is irrelevant and unthoughtful, as another comment said, is just "typical SV think". UX to the end user is certainly becoming much more relevant in the enterprise space, it's not as black and white as you think.

(note - i'm a former SAP employee and I've certainly seen my fair share of shit)

Post reply on HN