
Why Enterprise Software Sucks - randomwalker
https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
======
MarcScott
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 the submission locally.

7\. I'd convert to .py to test the code worked.

8\. I'd assign a grade.

9\. I'd then have to click (maybe 5 - 10 times) through to a different page to
record the grade.

10\. I'd then have to go back to the submissions page.

11\. After grading the first 5 submissions, I'd click through to the next
page.

12\. After grading the 6th submission, I would be returned to the first
submission page and have to click forward again.

13\. When you get to the 30th submission, you're maybe doing fifty clicks for
each homework assignment.

14\. I had 4 classes all doing the same assignment.

15\. This could not be amalgamated into a single marking spree.

I spent weeks trying to grade my students and then just gave up and had them
email me their assignments from that point on.

These platforms are all full of features; commissioned, designed, tested and
developed by people who have never set foot in a classroom.

~~~
cnst
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 me ISO8601
dates, please; HackerNews, you, too!)

At SXSW, there was a coffee-bot vendor. They didn't bother testing with an
adequate number of folks, so, the whole thing overflowed on first day.
Predictable? Yes. Would be noticed by a committee? Not a chance.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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 bother with giving the actual
date/time in the tooltip, which is the usual cop out (not an actual solution,
since there are no tooltips on mobile).

~~~
mbreese
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.

I'd expect a site/application that is designed for students to manage homework
would have different date/timestamp requirements.

~~~
MertsA
They could easily do it the Reddit way and still provide a timestamp but keep
the simplicity and relative time format. Just have it pop up the timestamp on
mouse hover. That's still very simple and can be effectively done using just
CSS.

~~~
cnst
You don't even need any CSS for that — the title attribute alone would be
sufficient.

------
freddie_mercury
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 philosophy that so many designers and
developers prefer. Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. People hate
them because they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.

But that's the same reason they can sell into law firms and oil refineries and
animation studios and all those other very diverse businesses.

And most enterprise software sucks because 1) writing complex, highly
configurable software is hard and 2) very few companies have the billions of
development dollars the above handful of companies have to throw at the
problem to try to make it tractable.

That the end user isn't the purchaser isn't going to change that fundamental
reality that businesses are complicated.

~~~
ridaj
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.

There absolutely are outlier businesses like banking, government, healthcare
and other highly regulated fields where they do have critical control needs.
Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX.

But the average business does not really have such needs, or at least it can
be a mistake to blindly trade off employee happiness and productivity against
feature checklists, yet that is typically the approach employed by procurement
experts.

~~~
asjw
No serious enterprise uses gsuite , it's a small businesses tool.

iPhones and smartphones in general have greatly increased the risk of data
theft or being spied.

Insurance companies are more than happy that others have switched to
smartphones (I worked in insurance consulting for cyber risks)

~~~
captrb
[https://gsuite.google.com/customers/](https://gsuite.google.com/customers/)

I don't think your comment is accurate, based on my first-hand knowledge of
large companies that use gsuite, as well as their customer list in the above
link.

------
dividido
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 stack and need a 1:1 rewrite”.

Big ships turn slowly and change is difficult. UX isn’t valued. Agile is
really waterfall and when a big is found it’s always a critical showstopper.
Enterprise is a different beast altogether.

~~~
Torwald
> 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?

~~~
beat
You're assuming that the cost of human capital actually matters in big
corporations. As someone who has worked for several Fortune 100s and a couple
of government agencies, I assure you, that is _not_ the case. Employee time is
treated as having no value, and things that damage the efficiency of employees
are not relevant.

I once saw a "cost saving" round prohibit our team's QA engineer from getting
a new SoapUI license (we were supporting an API!). It took three five-person
meetings to get official approval to buy a $100 license - at a human capital
cost of thousands of dollars. Not an eye was blinked at this absurdity.

Along the same lines, I once saw a lead architect go through the same nonsense
to get a $100 Adobe Acrobat license (at a government agency). He said to me
"It's easier for me to spend $100,000 dollars than to spend $100". He could
have asked for a couple of new heavy-duty Unix servers with Oracle, and gotten
it approved easily. But Adobe Acrobat? No, that's waste!

See also "bikeshedding".

~~~
mumblemumble
It works in the other direction, too. I've seen (and been in charge of) a
depressing number of projects that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars'
worth of people's time on writing an in-house replacement for a piece of
software that cost, at most, tens of thousands of dollars.

My working hypothesis is that management types don't really think the costs
are comparable, because licensing fees are an operating expense while in-house
development costs are a capital expense. Which is true, but I imagine in-house
development is a tricky thing compared to other capital expenses, since the
final product generally has zero market value.

~~~
Consultant32452
Cutting costs gets you a raise. Delivering a big project is a path to
promotion.

------
mjlee
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.

~~~
ocfnash
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 of dollars, years before.

~~~
dmix
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 dollar consultancy companies engage in.

Plus IBM makes even more doing the “integration” than the original sale.

~~~
blantonl
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.

~~~
jimbokun
Watson was the World's Greatest CS PhD Thesis.

Not so great as an actual business.

------
codesections
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
> more important. Because the value of the development effort is spread over
> only one company, the amount of development resources that can be justified
> is significantly less.

So, a lot of enterprise software sucks because it simply doesn't make sense to
make it decent. No matter how directly the end users communicate with the
developers, this won't change.

The economics of internal software don't apply to products like Blackboard
(which would go in Joel's "shrinkwrap" category), but the vast majority of
enterprise software is internal and thus sucks for reasons entirely unrelated
to this thread.

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

~~~
msla
> 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/](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.

------
impendia
When I click on Course Tools on Blackboard, I get a bewilderingly long list
including:

Basic LTI Tools, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Brainfuse HelpNow, Cengage
Learning MindLinks (TM), Content Market Tools, .... what _are_ all of these
things?! I want to track and post grades (and export them to a spreadsheet),
mass email my students, post a link to my syllabus and homework assignments.
That's it.

Meanwhile, with our recent "upgrade", the option to merge two sections of a
course (so that I can email both at the same time) went away. I have to email
our tech support (?!) to ask them to do this. Apparently this was supported by
a plug-in module (??) from a third-party vendor (??!!!) who went out of
business.

If merging two courses is so difficult as to require a third-party solution,
then I have to wonder about what Blackboard's codebase looks like.

~~~
oefrha
Never mind the useless crap. You’d think the spreadsheet used to enter grades
— a core functionality, and the only essential feature I need for a course
(everything else can be replaced by a mailing list) — would be at least
halfway decent. Nope, it’s the single most horrifying spreadsheet
implementation I’ve used in my life.

------
dredmorbius
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.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
Sort of.

Though the tumbler was invisible, and hence, not perceptible. You could go
through any number of cases of phenomena throughout history, such as the germ
theory of disease, prions, electromagnetic force, subatomic particles, or
mental health, all of which have, at least by current reckoning, _some_ level
of cause or mechanism, but which were seen as beyond description or
explanation in the past.

The case especially of moving from some sort of divine or moral explanation,
as has been the case for both infectious and (somewhat still the case) mental
illness is a critical one. Similarly for natural phenomena (comets, asteroid
impacts, earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclonic storms), often seen in the past as
portents of the gods / a god, rather than events with specific causal
mechanisms.

There are several Big Problems currently facing humanity which are straddling
this manifest/not-manifest cusp, with media manipulation and global warming
being two of the more prominent.

------
vfc1
Pretty true. For example, some of the worst applications I have ever used are
by far timesheet applications.

It's a product with a completely captive audience, that cannot go to the
competition. If you don't fill your timesheet, you don't get paid its that
simple.

Typically these are either built-in house, or are an expensive third party
product with terrible usability, bought by managers who might not even have to
use it.

If an application's audience is captive which is by definition the case of
most enterprise applications, there is no incentive to care about user
experience, unlike public internet applications.

~~~
ineptech
Ditto with job applicant portals. They have a bunch of weird features for
doing obscure HR stuff like internal approval chains, but terrible UX for the
actual applicant. Would it be so hard to handle applicants whose resume is a
url?

~~~
dx87
A couple of years ago, I was applying to work for a big government contractor,
and even though they wanted to hire me, they couldn't figure out how to move
forward past the "contigent job offer" phase in their new hiring software. I
ended up taking a job somewhere else after going back and forth with HR for
over a month as they tried to figure out things on their end.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I had a contract where the recruiter apologized in advance for the onboarding
process. It started with not being able to create an account with the
e-signature vendor with whom I had an old, deactivated account, and being
unable to get the bureaucracy to send the paperwork to a different email
address. It went downhill from there.

------
visiblink
We were forced to 'upgrade' years ago from WebCt to BlackBoard. The worst part
was not the feature set, but re-learning all of the things you already knew
how to do.

So when the administration decided to hold focus group sessions on whether to
purchase a new system (because the prices were suddenly raised, IIRC), a few
of us got Moodle included among the choices, and then managed to convince our
colleagues and the institution to accept it with the most convincing
rationale: the price would never change and since open source software _tends_
to be evolutionary for the most part, we probably would not face having to re-
learn how to use the system again.

I don't think you would be surprised to learn just how easy it was to convince
users to accept a system that's unlikely to experience massive change.

In any case, we've been using Moodle for years now. It's basically the same as
when they set it up, and all my labour-saving import-export tricks have
remained consistent over the years.

------
duxup
I used to work in support at a big company.

We went through endless Salesforce resigns with folk's who don't use them all
making decisions and patting themselves on the back for each redesign. It was
horrific as a user experience, everyone is a UI expert and had an opinion
based on this one time a thing happened... 3 years ago... In fact most every
decision was made dude to some anecdotal incident where the person who tells
the story was mildly inconvenienced this one time.

Fast forward a few decades and I'm a web developer writing software. My direct
customer has a website where they want updates on various things from their
partners. This site is entirely for their partner's benefit, our direct
customer has a different site for the same data so that they can do more
complex things. These partners are barely computer literate, our partners are
"power users" (everything is relative here).

So of course this site I built that is dead simple because any complexity
confuses them, and by most measurements (and my conversation with the
partners) it is doing well.

Accordingly my direct customer wants like dozens of new fields, options to
export data and etc ... all things that their partner's never do, didn't ask
for ... and don't understand.

Meanwhile I ask the customer(s) about adding a block of text in a section of
the site to help guide the partner's along better .... no response. (actually
I've started just adding them on my own now...)

~~~
arethuza
CRM products tend to be super easy to customise, so they often end up a
complete mess simply because it is so easy to add or change stuff.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a really good point. In general, the more you reduce the cost of doing
a thing, the more of that thing you'll end up with. The Jevons paradox.

If the reduced cost is of making gratuitious changes to a system's appearance
or interface ... you'll end up with a bunch of gratuitious UI changes.

------
speedplane
The listed reasons why enterprise software sucks are not terribly
controversial, they are well known. Perhaps more controversially, here are
some reasons why enterprise software is good and maybe even fun:

1\. The domain that the software operates in is usually complex and varied.

2\. The job that the software does is often meaningful, and helps people be
more efficient or faster at a job, as opposed to simply entertaining them.

3\. Users of the software are generally professionals, and can accept (and
often demand) a deeper learning curve in exchange for more features.

4\. It's generally more fun to develop software for smart devoted people than
uncommitted interlopers.

5\. Smart people using your software often directly challenge you to innovate
(they make feature requests), rather than spending most of your time reverse
engineering the psychology of your users based on aggregate behavior whom you
rarely interact with.

6\. Enterprise software often needs to dive deep into an industry or practice,
they don't need to generalize to everyone.

7\. This isn't a distinct benefit, but enterprise software does not need to be
a large monolithic application, it can be nimble and fast moving like any
other software.

------
ineedasername
No, it's really more complicated than "Built to appeal to decision makers, not
actual users."

In terms of decision makers vs. users, the issue is that there is more than
one group of users. For Blackboard, there are faculty, students, and
administrators. There's a venn diagram of overlapping desires there, but
there's also plenty of room for contradictory requirements.

Second is the nature of enterprise software:

\--It's large, expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. So, you can't go
switching it out every time a cool new product comes to market with new
convenient features. You're stuck with it.

\--But the vendor doesn't want to lose customers, so they figure out a way to
bolt on the most popular things that come along, usually 2-3 years afterwards.

\--The implementation is clunky and awkward and adds complexity for users that
don't need the feature and maintenance of the system

The alternatives aren't great either: Pick an up & comer, like Canvas. It's
smoother, more refined UI, less bloat, etc. People switch, because it does 80%
of what they need very well, and they decide they can live without the 20%
hardly anyone ever used. But over time, Canvas gets caught in the same trap.
Users clamor for more features over time. They bolt on more and more, and the
process repeats.

Sometimes a corporation (or university) will try to circumvent this. They go
"best of breed" for all functionality

\--They buy a minimalist LMS, they buy a separate system for advising &
appointments etc., they buy a third system to replace the financial component
handled by Blackboard Transact, etc.

\--And, for a short period of time, users may be a little happier, until bolt-
ons creep into each product, but maintenance & integration costs explode on
the infrastructure side.

\--If it gets too bad, someone in leadership will eventually say, "Why are we
spending 3x as much on license maintenance with <X> full time employees to
keep it all running when we can get one single system to do it all for us?

And some variation of the above cycles repeat over & over.

~~~
kd0amg
What do administrators use Blackboard for, and is it actually very good at
that?

~~~
ineedasername
Administrators use it for data analysis on course usage, trend analysis in
course performance, and other groups also us it for some types of financial
transactions. None of it's great, most of it is minimally adequate.

------
__MatrixMan__
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, committees will go back to
> their checklists, and feature creep will resume.

The solution is simple, don't put away the pitchforks. Keep them out until the
people choosing the software inform the people that make the budget that that
money would be better spent elsewhere.

If the professors don't know what tools those are, spend the money you're
saving by not forcing featureful garbage down people's throats on engaging the
studentry until the answers are clear.

Like maybe create work-study programs where students who know how to run the
kind of boring website the web was designed for are paid to assist teachers in
this task.

~~~
swiley
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.

~~~
curryst
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"

~~~
swiley
It’s common among chemistry students because of the incredibly expensive Unix
software they use for calculating eg molecular orbitals. I’ve gone to their
meetings and listened to them, they know little about computers and are taught
to use ssh.

------
AdmiralAsshat
My slightly geekier explanation for Why Enterprise Software Sucks is to simply
link to this facetious GH repo:
[https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition)

~~~
jplayer01
[https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition/issues/443)

This is fantastic.

~~~
sixstringtheory
Created 2 days ago! I’d say I’m shocked this repo is still going strong, but
with the amount of SaaS fodder geared towards dev teams these days, seems like
we’ll never have enough time to incorporate them all. Throw em on the backlog.

------
addisonj
Disclaimer: I work at Instructure, the company that makes the LMS Princeton is
moving too. Opinions are my own, etc

First things first, Blackboard is some of the worst of enterprise software and
a huge part of why they have lost so much market share is not only because
they had a difficult and obtuse to use product, it is also because they were
extremely aggressive in buying out any competition and EOLing their products
and forcing schools against their will onto Blackboard.

And I think this is the bit that is often the case about the worst enterprise
software is the it gets to a point where customers are so entrenched that the
company behind the product has market forces that drive it to grow through
unhealthy means that are often hostile to customers.

To his conclusion about all software tending towards these same problems, I
can't agree more. It is a HUGE challenge to continue to deliver software that
remains easy and friendly to use in light of the real need to add real
features. You simply can't just ignore the market that thinks differently
about a given problem and the workflow to solve it.

I think the right answer to this problem is not just really great product and
UX (though that is critical), the real challenge is to figure out the
underlying technology platform and engineering process that makes it cheap to
build new features and compose them together without the complexity becoming
overwhelming for your average engineering team. From what I can tell, this
sort of architecture looks _vastly_ different from how most software is
started and how we think about software in general. Making that transition is
one of the hardest things to do in engineering and it is what sets apart
companies who continue to deliver well liked software and those companies that
tend towards being defined by worst tropes of "enterprise software"

~~~
Cenk
> a huge part of why they have lost so much market share is not only because
> they had a difficult and obtuse to use product, it is also because they were
> extremely aggressive in buying out any competition and EOLing their products
> and forcing schools against their will onto Blackboard.

Sounds familiar — that’s essential what Chegg did to all online reference
management tools. They bough out RefME, CiteThisForMe, EasyBib, Citation
Machine, BibMe, and probably some more that I don’t know off the top of my
head. They then remove functionality from all the sites and shoved them full
of ads for their other services.

Citationsy ([https://citationsy.com](https://citationsy.com)) is still
independent of course :-)

------
qubex
As somebody who has: (1) At a management level, chosen and implemented and
defended unpopular and objectively clunky enterprise software; (2) As a user,
been riled by the utter degeneracy of clunky enterprise software chosen and
implemented and defended by others; (3) As a developer, had to splice
additional functionality into crufty enterprise software; I have come to the
conclusion that the main reason enterprise software sucks is because those who
choose it are not those who are condemned to use it, and draw benefits (such
as additional data) without paying any of the daily costs in maddening
workflows and utterly shitty user experience.

------
aloisdg
Read it on thread reader:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
Why Twitter Threads Suck ;-)

------
rawoke083600
With JIRA (and most other enterprise ticketing/scrum sofware) EVERYTHING is
possible but nothing is easy ! What I want to buy is NOT 1001 to
log/validate/confirm/report a "login form" doesn't work issue. I want to BUY
someone's workflow that has invested real time and research and optimised the
workflow. The software should only have a supporting minor role in this
workflow-product.

Its like buy a super-duper-expensive-hi-fi-amplifier... I don't want 9 dials
to control the tone and bass. I will never be as good as the sound engineers
as NAD. I want to buy THEIR tone expertise ! i.e an amplifier with an on-off
and volume button.

~~~
enra
We are pretty much building this. We want to optimize the workflows so they
actually make sense and recommend best best practices. The main thing we want
support is individual's and the team's momentum. If the team has momentum,
it's feels good and overall the company will make more progress. Features or
anything that get in a way of that should be automated or not added at all.

[https://linear.app](https://linear.app)

~~~
rawoke083600
Looks good... but if you want to sell me (based on my first comment)..The
word(feature) "issue tracking" should not be the first thing I see. I again
"see" just another "issue tracking product" ( with a slick interface). Sell me
a workflow-process not software.

------
teddyc
I used to work in higher ed and dealt with the awful Blackboard system.

For reference as to how bad it was, different modules used different database
vendors (MSSQL vs Oracle).

Also here's a comment I had left myself about how to work with dates in the
Oracle db (aka the Blackboard Transaction System, aka BBTS):

    
    
      # BBTS doesn't use a date,datetime, or time column from its database.  
    
      # Instead, it uses a float that is the number of days since 12-30-1899.
    
      # The Ruby Time class is ideal for handling this, but the Ruby Time 
    
      # class doesn't work for dates before 01-01-1970.
    
      # The magic number is: TransactionSystem::MAGIC_DATE_NUMBER (25,569)
    
      # If BBTS is below that number, we must use the Date class.
    
      # If BBTS is above that number, we will subtract 25,569 from the BBTS 
    
      # and start counting from 01-01-1970 instead of 12-30-1899.
    
      # Dealing with dates before 1970 will take much longer to process.
    
    
    
    
    

It was quite a challenge to make use of it.

------
imgabe
It's like how the decision to write a blog post as a series of tweets is
really easy for the writer who doesn't have to deal with the task of reading a
series of disjointed blurbs of text.

------
drawkbox
> _" Software companies can be breathtakingly clueless when there's a layer of
> indirection between them and their users."_

Any product where the users or consumers of the service are not the target
market is horrible and becomes misguided on pricing and functionality.

Enterprise software is surely caught up in this mess of usability not tuned to
their actual customers that have to use it. There is some abstracted target
customer above the actual users that clouds the usefulness and utility of the
product.

You might say in the US that we have _enterprise healthcare_ , the target
market should be consumers and doctors, but the insurance companies target
customer is employers and their own bottom line.

------
dredmorbius
A/K/A: The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Purchase Manager/Committee.

(See:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/))

------
auiya
In the case of taxpayer funded deployments (i.e. government acquisitions) it's
generally due to being built by the lowest bidder, coupled with an inadequate
incentive structure to fix. This may also be the case in some corporate
deployments.

~~~
ianai
It’s also being designed and implemented in a situation where 5 people plan
and oversight the work of 1 person-ish. IT is pretty horrible about having
lots of know-nothings with shiny job titles telling one or far fewer people
who actually do the work and know what is possible that their technical
objections or restrictions are false/made up/etc.

------
dkrich
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.

------
octorian
"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.

------
scarface74
_Software companies can be breathtakingly clueless when there 's a layer of
indirection between them and their users._

They aren’t being clueless at all. Companies care about their customers - the
people paying - not the users.

------
theschwa
The truth is though, if you make user focused B2B software, it likely won't do
well.

I worked on a product recently where we built a new stripped down mobile
version of our enterprise software that was extremely easy to use for the
average user, but had minimal functionality for management. Our manager users
have never been big adopters of our mobile software, because they spend most
of their time looking at large reports that don't work well on mobile, so we
figured this was a safe strategy, at least for the initial launch.

However, we saw extremely low adoption, because managers would try the app,
see that the minimal amount of features for them, and then they wouldn't
recommend it for the rest of our users. We refocused to adding features for
management, and we started to see much larger adoption by the average user.

Selling user focused software to the someone who isn't the main user will
always be an uphill battle. The companies that have had the most success are
those like Slack that are able to get into the organization without the buyers
approval first.

------
rwmj
On the other hand, good enterprise software ... Comes with an API that doesn't
break on a whim every few weeks, but is stable over years or decades. Works
diligently to solve bugs on a timetable. Changes gradually. Has plenty of
documentation. Offers training courses. Is certified to work in highly
regulated environments.

------
smg
Steve Jobs made this point very well in this video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvvzktuVY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvvzktuVY8)

~~~
mamurphy
Nice video. I've definitely heard this narrative before. There was a great
blog post on HN a while back bemoaning feature lists but I couldn't find the
one I am remembering on google. I found two other on-point articles of
interest, though:

[https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/everything-
yo...](https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/everything-you-know-
about-selecting-enterprise-software-is-wrong/)

[https://werd.io/2016/stop-writing-specs-start-finding-
needs-...](https://werd.io/2016/stop-writing-specs-start-finding-needs---what-
ive-learned)

------
rvense
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.

------
k__
I had the impression, after working in two big corps, often even the "IT
people" working there don't know much about IT.

Sure, the people who run their data-centers often know their stuff, but "IT
professionals" in their other depts are some business people with some extra
IT training.

Often there is at least one person who doesn't know what they are doing, but
doesn't say so. Which leads to bad decisions.

One is enough, because all the people who say "they don't know" will go to the
ones who don't say it. Then you end up with some a whole bunch of subtle
implementation details that are based on wrong decisions, but accumulated to
one big mess.

------
iamsb
Some very valid points in that twitter threads.

Enterprise software sucks because most companies who build them hardly have
product designers. The distance between people who build those softwares and
end users is quite a lot and no direct communication is usually possible. Most
of the people building these software have zero idea of what the end user
stories look like.

My wife, an optometrist, spent many a evenings complaining about the severe
lack of usability in the software she had to use everyday. It is so bad that
when she quit her job she found another firm which used the same software so
that she did not have to go through learning yet another crappy software
again.

------
kanokun
Products die young or live long enough to become complex "enterprise software"
that a subset of its users hate immensely.

I would also like to point out enterprises have unique and complex workflows
which require these softwares to have such complexity. I worked for a a big
bank and every new manager/director/partner tried to bring in change by
introducing more complex workflows and more checks.

So it's not a software problem its a people problem. It starts of as a thing
that could be done on a white board and then you end up using complex Service
now UI to do the same stuff.

------
danny_taco
I'm the lead developer in an org where due to the nature of servicing multiple
stakeholders that have a lot of say on what we build - we're building these
these types of monstrosities where everything is configurable so it takes
dozens of clicks to go anywhere and the end user is not a priority.

Yesterday I almost cried. I've started dusting off the old resume, catching up
on my craft and I plan to go back as a senior software engineer in a consumer
facing project at a remote first organization, wish me luck.

------
mcv
This is very relevant to my current project. We're building a dashboard that's
fed with very diverse data, could allow you navigate and examine that data in
tons of different ways, and we could make it incredibly configurable.

But we're also aware that our users are not power users. It first needs to be
understandable to use it. If we throw a ton of features at them, because
they'll drown in them and then not use it. And the prospective users are the
decision makers here: we're building this for upper management, and they have
no idea that they should want this, so we have to make this attractive, easy
and pleasant to use. When they see it, they have to want more, not be put off
by incomprehensible complexity.

So we're holding back on features. I know a million features I could add to
this, and I really want to, but every time the question becomes: how will they
access this? How will they understand what this does? So we're careful in
adding features, and put a lot of time into getting the interface right. It
doesn't yet have all the features I want it to have, but hopefully all the
features it has will be features they understand and want to use. And then
we'll add more based on what they need, not on what we think we can offer,
because that's going to be way too much.

------
paultopia
As a professor, this is completely true about blackboard, and every other LMS
(like canvas, etc.).

Making it worse is that some universities have policies forbidding professors
from rolling their own system (either for frivolous "security" reasons in the
low-trust environment that is the modern university or because of some kind of
bizarre ideas about brand identity), so there is no market pressure on any of
these companies to actually serve end users. It's horrible.

------
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.

------
arwhatever
"Body Shop" consultancy farmed me out to company producing software for
corporations in an industry known for its artificially-inflated profit
margins. Additionally, the software itself helps (or at least, was intended to
help) the corps with regulatory compliance.

Company's software was horrendous, but they were making millions selling to
this industry, and I quickly came to realize they did so by having a 5:1
marketer:software developer ratio, and selling to people making purchase
decisions who were very much not spending their own money.

And as a developer who worked on the project for several months, I have no
idea what the end-user experience must have been like, but I can guess.

Problems with their app dev process (largely a personal rant):

1\. Nested Active Record pattern meant developers could not reason about the
performance of the code. Simply referencing some Object.Foo property meant
than a virtually unbounded number of out-of-process calls would be sent to the
db. Management abhorred the notion of doing anything to improve this.

2\. Cloud-based SQL Server hosting was cost prohibitive (customers prohibited
multi-tentanting), so mgmt thought they could get their dba to convert the app
to Postgres by doing find-and-replace of the SQL strings that were basically
interleaved 1:1 with code all throughout the application.

3\. Mgmt would get 3-4 people to work on the same code file simultaneously, in
a dynamically-typed language and with no unit testing. "Hydra Bug" doesn't
even begin to describe ...

And this company was making millions of dollars selling this software.

------
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.

------
waynecochran
Reminds me of my latest experience with the enterprise video conferencing
software that will remain nameless.

One very important thing is knowing that your mic is muted. The button for
muting the mic has an icon of a mic with a slash thru it (which in other
software would mean your mic is off/muted). No. Not with this wonderful piece
of enterprise software. I found out by yelling across the house at one of my
kids while I was in a conference call with about 100 folks all over the world.
It is the color of the button that tells you whether the mic is muted (aside:
I am color blind). Later, after reading the online docs this is what I
determined about the color of the button:

    
    
         * blackish => not being used (?)
         * red => used but currently muted
         * blue => used and on
         * clear => someone else muted you! 
    

If you have to read docs to figure this out then the software is already a
failure. Also having a slash thru the mic should definitely imply the mic is
off if they did any usability testing!

Also, the mic is _on_ by default! Also, I noticed my video camera was on as
well by seeing the little orange light at the top of the screen!!

------
samsolomon
A bit of insight into the complexities of designing enterprise software—I'm a
product designer who's been fortunate enough to work on a fast growing
product. When I joined our average number of seats was probably about 20. I'd
imagine it's now 10x that.

As the post mentions the buyer is not always the end-user and in the
enterprise space features are often prioritized for the buyer. That's not
necessarily a bad thing, but enterprise product teams should watch out for
buyer-focused features that deteriorate the end-user's experience. We spend a
lot of time thinking about how to avoid that.

There is also a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. It is often
impossible to do both and larger customers will always want flexibility.

Designing for multi-level hierarchies within organizations is also
exceptionally difficult—visibility, access controls, permissions, groups,
group hierarchies—these have all been the most difficult features I've ever
worked on.

I have immense respect for the product teams at Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and
the other enterprise software companies. The stuff is not easy.

------
collyw
I needed to do a bit of searching to realise that Blackboard is a software
product and not what the teachers used to write on in school with chalk.

------
segmondy
The real reason is that different businesses have different needs. No one
company knows all these needs in the beginning, so they build and keep tacking
on to their existing solution. They can't easily refactor and break UI changes
for their existing clients, so it's end up a big ol mess of everything.

Given everything most enterprise companies know, they can design cleaner
simpler software, but the reality is there's no time to stop when you have a
business to run for the big ol design. When that is done most of their
customers are pretty unhappy, something as simple as changing UI change can be
very expensive for your clients, they might have to retrain thousands or tens
of thousands of their users. Something as simple as an upgrade, if not a zero
time upgrade can affect tens of thousands of users. Enterprise is not as
stupid as folks make it out to be. There's a reason they got to being
enterprise and make a lot of money, they are a different kind of smart.

------
phaedryx
An observation: Instructure (Canvas) was started by a couple of college
students; it was born out of frustration with Blackboard.

------
40four
Ok, so this has been locked in as one of the top posts on the front page for a
day or two now. I'm sure there is a good reason. Maybe it's an interesting
topic, or a lot of people agree with the particular message.

But can we talk about Twitter "essays", as I like to call them, for a minute?

As soon as I see someone chaining together 3-4-5+ (let alone) 10 tweets in a
row, I immediately check out & hit the back button. That's not what Twitter is
for.

It has a short character limit for a reason. It's meant for SMALL, quick
thoughts. Things I can scroll through quickly, consume, and move on to the
next bit in my feed. Not long, drawn out opinion pieces.

If you have that much to say, write a blog post about it. Write a post in a
relevant sub-reddit. Send an OP-ed piece to your local newspaper for all I
care. ANYTHING, buy try to make me follow your meandering, 10+ tweet long,
stream of consciousness.

I admit I didn't read past the second tweet in the chain. I read enough to
learn this twitter 'essay' was spurred by his college droping blackboard. I
remember blackboard in college. It's was pretty mediocre but served it's
purpose for it's time & place.

Anyway... I get the reason people do this. It's typically people with a lot of
followers (like this guy, with 50 thousand) and they know this is the platform
that will get the most reaction for whatever undeveloped, spur of the moment,
rant they want to spew out.

Which is my point. Twitter is for undeveloped, spur of the moment rants. And
if it spans more than two tweets, then tweeet us a link to your blog post. Or
else don't get mad when I get distracted by comments in the third tweet, and
go down a rabbit hole of shit talk before I make it to the end.

Well, sorry for the HN comments rant here. I got a little to angry I guess,
but at least this is a place where long form comments are acceptable. Twitter
is not.

~~~
bonoboTP
They do this because it drives more engagement than tweeting a blog post link.

~~~
40four
Yeah you're right. It's just been driving me crazy for a while now.

It just feels so clunky. It feels very self-gratifying.

Part of my point is you typically only see this from folks who have a large
amount of followers. Of which, a good percentage would be happy to click on a
link to writing from someone they're ibterested in.

Seems like they are doing it because they enjoy the reaction from their
follower base on the platform.

Don't make us try to follow a 1000 word thesis, in disjointed, 240 character
increments... which might all have their own chain of comments.

Let us read the whole argument uninterrupted, & comment @ the end together.
I'm only saying the platform isn't suited for long form ideas & discussion.

Again, sorry for ranting. Maybe I'm just in a mood tonight haha.

~~~
bonoboTP
> Part of my point is you typically only see this from folks who have a large
> amount of followers.

I think that's reversed. They gathered a following by posting this way.

------
jerf
"Here’s the kicker, though. It's extremely likely that whichever vendor
emerges on top will fall into the same trap. The incentives almost guarantee
it."

Why do all bug trackers start out as "simpler than
$TODAY'S_DOMINANT_BUG_TRACKER", only to become the thing that tomorrow's bug
tracker is simpler than? Why do programming languages almost all start as a
"simple alternative to $X", only to be the thing that needs a simpler
alternative in 10 years? Why are there so many UNIX shells that start as
"simple alternatives" but then grow too large? Why are there so many libraries
and frameworks that started out as "lightweight" but grew into monsters?

Because the problem is in the incentive structure of the problem space, not
the terrible programmers who just couldn't resist adding so much complexity.

------
sshadmand
I was surprised to not find a single instance of "fear" or "accountability" in
all the comments. The major driving force in "Big Enterprise" is putting a
price tag on "are you prepared for something to go wrong." Either with bad
actors, stupid mistakes, or lack of resources. The overhead and settings
required to increase or decrease how much exposure the customer is willing to
take is what drives the indu$try. That being said, I don't disagree with a lot
of the comments. There is definitely the case of over engineering, but that is
a bi-product of a business having to decide between making money or turning
away a customer. Great companies have kept it simple while steered their users
toward simplicity (which drives down cost and errors for all parties).

------
proc0
All stated reasons are valid, however in the software industry, IMHO, the #1
reason is because in many companies, if not most, the people writing the code
are not the people making decisions. It's also easy to see that it's the most
successful ones that are lead largely by advanced technical people. From my
experience it seems there is always a tension between how highly technical
people and the business people make decisions. In some cases this gap is a
chasm, and the miscommunication across the technical skill gap is so bad there
is a lot of wasted time, effort and money, building horrible software and
prioritizing the wrong things. And even when a balance is attained, it either
doesn't last long or it makes huge compromises in productivity (basically
everyone is happy condoning bad software).

------
ben509
One thing I'm not following is a few remarks that they don't do usability
testing because it is subjective and thus a lawsuit magnet.

We're talking about universities that, as part of their mission, have
psychology departments run studies that must conform to ethical guidelines.

Couldn't they evaluate the usability of candidate products by coming up with a
list of tasks that a small sample of students and professors must complete,
and rate how difficult they are? Take the mean weighted by how critical the
features are there's a reasonably objective usability score.

There's still a subjective element, but it can be mitigated by selecting
participants at random and having them disclose any potential conflict of
interest.

I realize this is no small undertaking, but it's part of their core
operational model, so it doesn't seem unrealistic.

------
gnicholas
> _Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy
> Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so
> they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an
> outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work._

Magnets? That sounds like a terrible idea, since babies are not supposed to be
around little magnets that they could swallow (and after a few times through
the washer/dryer, magnets could come loose.

Is this really a thing? I have two kids (and one baby, so we're in the thick
of it), and I've never heard of this. More importantly, we wouldn't think of
buying anything for a baby that has little magnets sewn into cloth.

~~~
ben509
> More importantly, we wouldn't think of buying anything for a baby that has
> little magnets sewn into cloth.

This attitude is insane and why so many people refuse to have kids.

~~~
gnicholas
Can you elaborate? There’s no need to put magnets in baby clothing, and there
is some risk to doing so. Why do it then?

Also, zippers take 3 seconds to do...if you don’t have 3 seconds to zip up the
kid, you probably don’t have time to change the diaper underneath...

~~~
ben509
It's the histrionic piety that's the problem, not the particulars of the
facts. It's in the context of watching parents killing themselves to prove to
other parents how their children are their sole focus in life, and that anyone
who would do less is an unworthy parent.

It's evident in an argument of the form "we wouldn't think of X," wherein
compromise is simply declared out of bounds of any possible discussion.

Prior generations of parents did not do this; they struck a balance between
their children's needs and their own needs. That's why there are new terms to
describe the modern excess: helicopter parenting and even "snowplow"
parenting[1]. These are not healthy developments for parents, children or
society as a whole.

[1]: [https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/what-caused-the-
college-...](https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/what-caused-the-college-
admissions-scam-snowplow-parenting/)

~~~
gnicholas
Well, the good news is that you've completely misunderstood my comment.
There's no histrionics, nor piety. I don't care what other people do for their
kids (I said this elsewhere in the thread), and I can imagine that other
people, especially people with disabilities, might find the magnets to a
useful option. But for me, zippers are easy and work just fine. Therefore
there's no need to take even a small risk to replace something that works just
fine.

Another consideration is the flood of cheap counterfeits on Amazon (commingled
at times), which means that you can't actually trust that the item you
purchase is the genuine article (i.e., that it's as well-built as the
descriptions say). So

I'm not sure what snowplow/helicopter parenting has to do with any of this,
but I'm right there with you that people do too much of that.

If anyone out there decides not to have kids because I don't buy baby clothes
with magnets, I think they care too much about what other people do (with
their own babies).

------
jackvalentine
Honestly one of the factors leading to my burnout and depression was being
required to be 'the face of' and promote the use of a piece of enterprise
software that just confounded your expectations as a user at every turn.

I tried my best, I went to conferences and met the woman charged with
modernising the UI and submitted the extensive feedback she asked for. She
left the company 3 months later.

Training sessions were a constant flow of 'yeah that is a bit weird, but
that's how it works!'.

I submitted via the vendor's service portal enhancement requests for
everything that came up. Two years later they were all closed.

I knew it was hopeless, but I had to try. I wish I'd just refused and found
somewhere else to work.

------
Balanceinfinity
This is also why training often sucks: the teachers write the presentation not
for the people sitting in the class (who are often required to attend), but
for the people who run the training office or the supervisors who order the
training.

------
rodolphoarruda
> "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
extremely focused on building atractive UX to instructors because that is
where you find most of the critical success factors for a good implementation
and ongoing operations. If you have a well thought implementation and
operational model, work for administrators can be reduced to a minimum,
specially if they have purchased the "managed hosting" pack.

Back to instructors, they are the ones who need to adopt the platform in the
first place and then either conform to the type of online course they will be
delivering -- in case it is a cookie cutter model -- or be trained and
prepared to create and maintain their own courses. Some institutions still opt
for a blended model in which professors have more or less liberty to shape the
course to their needs, and that would depend mostly on the program structure.

So what the student ultimately sees and uses is the resulting product of a lot
of people working behind the scenes. It's hard to generalize and blame Bb, or
admins, or even instructors. Blackboard offers a full set of services for
"Adoption", and they are delivered by EDU consultants who know very little
about Blackboard Learn, the LMS. They know about EDU processes, student
motivation and online learning approaches that are LMS agnostic. With that,
instructors could be taking a leading role in driving student UX experience
through the platform and learning objects it delivers.

IMHO, enterprise software sucks (to everyone) because it is really large,
complex and depends on the dedication of an army of people with different
skills and viewpoints. Well, that's the glass half empty. You can also say
enterprise software is the coolest thing because it exercises and uses the
very best of us all the time, a real tech challenge. That's the glass half
full.

~~~
bzbarsky
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...

------
ironman1478
Enterprise software doesn't have to suck. I worked on databases for oil & gas
and similar systems and even though the UI wasn't the best, it was an off the
shelf solution that many customers could use their complex problems and
regulatory needs. If ease of use is your only metric of quality then lots of
Enterprise software sucks, but if you measure quality by how effectively it
solves a problem for a customer, Enterprise software might not look so bad.
Also blackboard might suck (as a student it didn't strike me as horrible), but
there are good tools in the same industry like Piazza.

------
mantoto
Do you know the huge GitHub banner which gives you a link to there basic
tutorial?

I have seen too many people in it NOT clicking this huge waste of space away
but instead always scrolling down before doing anything.

User don't care that much apparently.

~~~
teddyh
Users theoretically _care_ , they just _don’t see it_ ; it’s called banner
blindness:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness)

Also, “In fact, users don’t read _anything_.”:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-
peop...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-people-who-
have-better-things-to-do-with-their-lives/)

------
Trias11
Partially because enterprises are hiring el-cheapo hit-n-run development
contractors via Tatas and alikes and all along this middlemen-infested food
chain no one really cares about the product, users and customers.

------
mch82
...Red Hat “Enterprise“ Linux

Companies buy it because of sales, support, and the warrantee (the ability to
hold an “enterprise” with financial resources accountable for mistakes).

Importantly, because large companies use complicated, slow decision making
processes with many people involved it is very expensive for them to buy
software AND it is extremely expensive to sell them software. Vendors of
“enterprise” software can support all the meetings and risk all the expense of
that sales process.

The feature checklist exists to provide rationale for the purchasing decision,
but it isn’t essential to the decision.

------
sidcool
Threadreader:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html)

------
_bxg1
For my senior project, they had us prototype a replacement for Blackboard.
This was not just an exercise: the CS department was seriously considering
building and maintaining their own alternative.

~~~
purple_ducks
Yes and it would eventually become the thing that everyone hates...with code
written by academics and not software professionals.

~~~
_bxg1
They already had a custom web interface for submitting and testing code. It
was... very HTML 1.0, but at least it wasn't actively user-hostile like
Blackboard.

------
goatherders
Loved this thread but none of this is new. I dont know anyone that likes SAP,
Netsuite, Etc. But that doesnt matter. Big companies make decisions to
minimize risk and stay on the right side of the law and compliance issues. If
the user(s) are miserable and wasting tons of time, no one cares because the
company is protected.

I am interested to see if today's new productivity apps (Notion, Trello,
Slack) end up in the same vortex of hell as the enterprise tempts them more
and more.

------
mongol
A regular larger enterprise probably have at least 500 individual software
systems, that have evolved over 30 or more years. Around this you have several
tens of thousands of employees. This landscape can be compared with an
extremely complex machine, or possibly with an organism having equally many
organs as there are systems. It is no surprise it sucks because this can never
work without constant manual intervention to fix what breaks and does not work
as expected.

------
defanor
I think one person choosing and others using (and/or maintaining) software is
a part of the reason, but another part is that "enterprise software" is
essentially a single software package used by multiple users, usually
incompatible with standard and open protocols/formats: even when the person
choosing it is happy to (and does) use it, it still can be (and often is, IME)
awful for others, due to differences in preferences and requirements.

------
rawoke083600
Nothing gets developers as excited as having hour long meetings to learn "the
correct way" to log a ticket ! O joy the workplace is set for innovation now !
FML

------
cbhl
Let's take this a step further. Why are the feature checklists used? Because
the schools are mandated to pick the lowest bidder through an RFP process. Not
the best value, not the most usable, just the lowest bidder. The checklists
were introduced as a metric to avoid wasting software that wouldn't meet the
users needs, but for years ed-tech companies have optimized for meeting the
checklist in the cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel way possible.

------
doyoulikeworms
I really love this thread!

I spent a few years doing indie game development, and one of this biggest
lessons that stuck with me was how to think about a product as an experience.
To me, game design was mostly that, but focused on making the experience fun,
I guess. A huge amount of time and effort went into thinking about what the
end user's experience would be like. By instinct, I tend to lean on thinking
about the "player's" experience.

------
Khaine
Enterprise software sucks because the people who develop it do not understand
the underlying business processes they are trying to support, and business
people who understand the processes do not understand how software can
interact with that process.

This leads to things like software being bent to support an existing (shitty)
process, rather then redesigning the business process to effectively integrate
software effectively to automate the process.

------
johannes1234321
> It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators
> (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions.

Hear hear!

I often put it this way: Enterprise software is sold by having the CIO/CEO
playing a round of golf with the sales person.

The CIO/CEO never have to use the software. They have assistants extracting
the relevant figures etc.

(For context: I interpret "administrators" not as sysadmin but administrative
staff)

------
jeffk_teh_haxor
* Everything is a "workflow" and you often find yourself stuck in some terminal error state for no reason. * No JSON, everything's a page load. * ...or, if there is JSON, it's done badly and you have an unholy combination of janky SPA functionality across multiple pages. * Arcane timeouts * "Disable your popup blocker" * Insane data validation errors. * Poor SSO integration.

I could go on.

------
rsj_hn
I think the main point is simple economics. Software is all fixed costs, the
costs of making a copy are zero.

So let's say you are making enterprise software, if your market is 1000
companies, you will sell at most 1000 copies. If you charge $100,000 per copy,
you will generate at most $100 million if you capture 100% of the market.
That's the world of enterprise software.

If you are making consumer software, your target audience is 3 Billion. If you
charge $10 and capture the whole market, you will make $30 Billion.

What that means is that compared to consumer software, enterprise software is
incredibly expensive while also having 1/300th of the development budget to
build the product.

 _Corollary 1:_ Enterprise software will never win head to head versus
consumer software, and firms will use consumer software whenever possible.

 _Corollary 2:_ Given the small dev budgets, Enterprise software will skimp on
all non-necessary aspects of development to meet the minimum viable product
standards before they can ship. This is why your corporate accounting software
package has a terrible UI but it has the required functionality and uptime.

 _Corollary 3:_ while consumer software often can fix bugs and roll out
patches on a monthly basis for free, enterprise software will fix bugs with
delays in years and only with expensive support contracts.

 _Corollary 4:_ Enterprise software is both highly customized and highly
rigid. Highly customized in that a lot of Enterprise software development is
bespoke for a few key customers because of Corollary 1, and highly rigid in
that Corollary 3 means you are stuck with whatever they deliver.

I remember for a while, Cisco had a branch for each major customer. Imagine
maintaining hundreds of branches in your code base.

Once you understand the basic economics of the thing, you no longer have to
ascribe ill will, incompetence, or ignorance to any actor. It's just "you get
what you pay for" and "no one can do miracles" in a product which is all fixed
cost.

With those broad facts in mind, most aspects of enterprise software become
obvious. I really don't think issues like "someone else buys it, not the user"
make much difference. After all, parents buy lots of consumer software for
their kids (games) which are amazing and incredibly polished.

------
chocolatebunny
This post seems to blame the administrators for picking a product based on
checklist. The problem is if the administrator is concerned about his end
user, he would consult his end users who will end up giving him a checklist of
features which would still be a problem. This missing piece is discussions on
user experience, which for enterprise software, would need to be done on a
case by case basis.

------
Quanttek
Because Blackboard was used as example, I just wanted to note that there are
also open-source alternatives: A larger number of German public universities
use ILIAS instead [https://www.ilias.de/en/](https://www.ilias.de/en/). While
it has its quirks, I find it to be much more usable and flexible than
Blackboard

------
quickthrower2
"Why posting"

"a long article"

"as a series"

"of tweets"

"sucks. And why it"

"is better to"

"just post a link to"

"a blog article, or"

"medium article."

"hell even a"

"sorry swap those last"

"two before these"

"three around"

------
Scuds
You'd think publicly funded schools would have a system-wide public software
infrastructure project instead of just writing a check to Blackboard every
year to infinity.

I always wondered why full time academic-oriented OSS activists like RMS
didn't campaign for things like this instead of trying to sell the concept of
"OSS in General"

------
kristianc
This existed much more in the old world of legacy software and perpetual
licences but is bad business in a SaaS model.

You end up in a situation where higher ups notice they’re not getting the best
use out of it so the customer ends up churning. Happy customers with happy end
users end up buying more of your software and are much more profitable.

------
dreamcompiler
This is right on. Enterprise software sucks because the entity paying for it
is not the entity using it.

The same issue is one of the factors that causes health care in the US to be
so maddening. US health care is essentially enterprise medicine. Patients
receive it but insurance companies pay for it, and the two agendas are not
aligned.

------
chank
A lot of enterprise software isn't even sold to the people who will actually
end up using it (users OR admins). It's some VP talking to another VP agreeing
on terms/pricing for "good enough/checklist" and "implementation" costs so it
will look good on their yearly review.

------
matt_morgan
What's wrong about this is only that users like features too. I.e. he's
exactly right that the features checklist leads enterprise software selection
processes astray. But I've participated in lots of them that have real users
in the room and even then, the features checklist wins.

------
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.

------
ashton314
At my university, I think they used to use blackboard, but we have since
migrated to a homegrown solution, partially built by students. Some professors
also use Instructure. I think the consensus among the students is, however,
the homegrown solution is better.

------
iamgopal
I think best solution will be, just like every business have accountant, every
business will have software designer and a easy to use software that can do
whatever it was asked to do, a cloud based software, with complexity and skill
of excel is enough.

------
natural20s
As an aside - the author of the post is Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan.
I took his free Cryptocurrency course on Coursera and it was superb. He really
broke down all of the concepts in an easy to understand way that has stuck
with me for years.

------
lone_haxx0r
Why Twitter sucks

------
ahappyguy
I think it's also economics. The person who is making the purchase decision is
different from the user. Hence, a lot of efforts are spent on courting the
purchaser compared to improving the product for the users.

------
elamje
I think it would be interesting to answer the counter here: so who is doing
enterprise software right?

Maybe they are disguised as a start up and hate the label, but what enterprise
software companies are taking the right approach?

BaseCamp? Slack?

------
m463
Enterprise software is the employee cafeteria.

It would never succeed out in the real world.

------
tibbydudeza
I am a SAP ABAP developer and it was my pleasure to debug a PO Badi the other
day ... sigh ... looking at the mess of of their code I was just amazed that
it was still running in 2019.

------
george_morgan
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem)

------
lordnacho
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.

~~~
save_ferris
The problem that companies like Slack face in making inroads in enterprise is
that companies like Microsoft dominate the market, and can offer entire suites
of products at a discount to keep customers exclusive to their platform.

Microsoft has it’s own internal chat tool (which is terrible), but this
strategy keeps their clients locked in while the buyers stay happy

~~~
chank
Pretty much this. We had a stint on Slack in our enterprise. We kept asking
for full licensing for it, but the higher ups moved everyone to Microsoft
Teams instead. It's not lacking against slack in any way. It really just comes
down to if you like the UX, which I don't like for either Slack or Teams.

------
brodouevencode
When I was in academia the faculty were on the committees that made such
decisions, especially those regarding ed tech. I guess Princeton is a
different story.

------
zarro
Procurement barriers to entry and bad feedback loops.

------
rdiddly
Tangential: Anybody know who started the "enterprise software sucks" meme? Was
it Eric S. Raymond? Paul Graham?

------
zachguo
Because the sales are done top-down(via executives) rather than bottom-up(via
actual users who are picky about the UX).

------
qwerty456127
You can make the feature set virtually infinite without forcing a ridiculous
UI by just embedding a reasonable API.

------
holografix
I invite anyone here moaning about Concur and Blackboard to enjoy using
Workday. Puts things in perspective.

------
jancsika
> There are two types of baby outfits.

1\. baby outfits marketed to people who cannot admit to themselves that they
are poor.

2\. baby outfits marketed to people who aren't poor.

The author is making a division between two types of outfits in the first
category. The second category has no such division-- those consumers have
enough money to pay for a product that looks good on the rack _and_ is
ergonomic.

Sorry.

------
pkd
From the first tweet, I thought they were talking about the actual chalk-on
Blackboard.

------
tempestn
This comic from the twitter thread sums it up pretty well:
[https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/...](https://twitter.com/jaukia/status/1114044716616753152/photo/1)

------
djsumdog
No one here has mentioned the open source alternatives: Mahara and Moodle.

------
baxtr
My feeling is that it got way better the last years...

------
ngoel36
I now understand why we still use Concur at work...

------
bashmohandes
WOW such a big clickbaity title with no substance, generalization of one

------
zelphirkalt
In my opinion it sucks, because people, who write it screw up even the most
simple things. In a lot of such software, you will get a search field for
something. Rarely the search field will work as you expect. Here are three
examples (beware, rant starting):

1\. Windows search: It will sometimes not find what you are looking for,
because it is not able to at least do a "string contains" check, if there are
no other results found. How stupid is that? Glad I don't have to use Windows
unless I am trying to solve a problem for someone who uses Windows.

2\. Confluence wiki: Nope, sometimes you will simply not find that page, with
some word in the title, which you input into the search field. Too stupid a
software, to simple check for string contains. Oh and also sometimes your
search does not work at all, because some service of Atlassian is offline.

3\. Friend of mine did some work for an insurance company. They had a software
to look up customers. You think you could easily find someone by looking for
their first or last name? Nope, he had to enter an additional space after the
first name, to be able to find the person, which of course was confusing.

So, I as a single person have coded in some projects search fields for
applications, but some huge company with dozens or more developers cannot get
a simple search field right, while I as a single person can write a search,
that allows incremental searching and is functionally complete with "not",
"or" and "and" operations on objects. Somehow I doubt the capabilities of the
engineers, who wrote the logic for those search fields in the examples I
mentioned.

There is also other things wrong with Confluence Wiki:

A while ago they claimed to now support Markdown in their editor. Well, it was
a not even half-assed support of Markdown, as most of the things I tried to
type in Markdown did not convert to the respective rendered elements. To this
day, the editor they have just sucks at Markdown and at times behaves
unpredictably. I despise having to put anything in the wiki, because of it's
buggyness, sluggishness and bad support for Markdown. How difficult can it be
to give me a simple editor and let me type Markdown or another sensible
format?

My personal blog has a better Markdown parser, than Confluence Wiki and I did
not even have to write it myself.

My self-written wiki uses reStructuredText files for pages, simply put in a
directory tree, which gets me document internal linking and cross references
to other pages of the wiki and the ability to simply put the wiki into a git
repository and have everything version controlled. Oh btw. version control is
also F*ed up in Confluence Wiki. Also I can simply "export" any page, by
copying its file, while in Confluence Wiki, you cannot even get a proper
export of a page. This is of course intentional, to keep customers stuck in
their Wiki. No way, that they provide simple means of migrating away. No,
better to hold the user captive in their BS software.

I have to agree with some other comment here, which mentioned, that the
problem is, that the buyers are not the users. I would happily give my own
wiki implementation to people at the job, but people, who make the decision on
what is used think, that Confluence Wiki will be better than anything a single
person can come up with.

------
pointerpointer
Well, not enterprise software only unfortunately, IMAO most software sucks.

------
CyanLite2
This guy got it completely wrong.

------
dqpb
You know what also sucks. Long form prose delivered via multi part Twitter
posts.

------
awillen
Sure, this is true, but it's a totally unoriginal thought:

[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/669-why-enterprise-
software-s...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/669-why-enterprise-software-
sucks)

[https://medium.com/@jeffbrydon/why-most-enterprise-
software-...](https://medium.com/@jeffbrydon/why-most-enterprise-software-
sucks-8f0fd3489f49)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v9y55/do_you_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v9y55/do_you_know_the_biggest_reason_why_enterprise/)

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.

------
rajacombinator
Enterprise software sucks because enterprises suck and the people willing and
able to sell to them suck.

