

Looks Like a Cow,Swims Like a Dolphin,Quacks Like a Duck,It Must Be Enterprise Software - twoz
http://www.subtraction.com/2007/10/19/if-it-looks-

======
wallflower
The classic saying is if you buy SAP/Oracle, you don't customize the software
suite to fit your company, you customize your company to fit the software.

~~~
param
I am not sure why that statement, in itself, is bad. I've been in the
enterprise software industry for a while, and I have seen how customers have a
tendency to request customizations on top of the base product that are huge in
scope and would kill the project. My org always recommends 0 customization
(never achieved, but intended) to shorten deployment time and go with codebase
that is maintained by the product team and does not need a huge in-house IT
staff post-deployment.

Of course, if the software is crap that statement would make sense, but if
that is the case, you should throw the tool out rather than try to plug the
holes.

~~~
wallflower
I look at the statement as not good or bad, just a statement of truth. There
is no such thing as shrink-wrapped enterprise software. I've worked with at
enterprise software organizations where the customer does their own custom
modifications and tries to politically lobby us to get them baselined (and
take ownership).

Modifications form a lucrative and essential part of enterprise software,
judging by what my co-workers and friends at other companies were billed out
at an hourly basis (the consultant was always paid a mere fraction of the
$100-$200/hr). Sometimes I wonder if paying for expensive consultants wasn't
just a CYA-move by the client ("look, I hired the company to consult
directly")

~~~
param
Then don't you mean that the original statement is false? You always change
the software to fit the company, and never change the company to fit the
software?

~~~
wallflower
Yes, like motivational quotes, there is always a bit of untruth to a statement
like that.

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quoderat
"...or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company...."

At a hospital near where I live that shall remain unnamed, I found a job that
seemed perfect for me on their site.

Except when I went to apply for it -- not joking -- the application was so
incomprehensible and novel-long that I just gave up.

I can't imagine they got the best people with such an application process,
though perhaps they got the most persistent ones, and the ones with no better
prospects.

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mattculbreth
Lots of reasons why, but mostly because the buyers aren't the users in most
cases. If users got to pick what they could use in a big company it'd be a WAY
different story.

------
twoz
Worthy link from the site's comment section:

Zawinski's Law

 _Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs
which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Coined by Jamie
Zawinski (who called it the Law of Software Envelopment) to express his belief
that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and
application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of
that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy._

<http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html>

~~~
twoz
More goodies from the comments section:

"Enterprise software" is a social, not technical, phenomenon

[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2005-April/0...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2005-April/000772.html)

------
10ren
What a cock and bull story ( _sic_.)

You know how Fred Brooks said to "build one to throw away"? You just can't do
that with Enterprise software because the businesses that use it need it to
keep living.

You know all those little things you learn as you go along, and you begin to
really understand the problem, and how to solve it properly? You can't do that
with Enterprise software either, because everything else relies on what you
choose already; and even worse, changes in the environment are coming in all
the time that you must adapt to first. That's hard enough, even with a stable
(if flawed) foundation to work from.

You can iteratively _adapt_ it, but you can't iteratively _improve_ it.

It's a problem of legacy, of network effects, of debugged/tested/working code
and of something relied on so strongly that you can't afford to mess with it.

Joel says you can't improve these things. You _can_ \- but it's a research
problem. "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" ( _rewrite code from scratch_ )
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

~~~
10ren
Incidentally, I often get _unknown or expired link_ when I submit comments,
which is presumably HackerNews' way of saying that I took too long considering
and drafting my comment. This seems to discourage thoughtful replies.

It seems to me that _intellectually stimulating_ discussion would be served
better by a longer timeout.

(fortunately, the back-button and cut-and-paste circumvents this problem, but
it gave me a start the first time).

------
derwiki
There's no incentive for enterprise software to be sexy or provide a good user
experience. Lotus Notes is the classic example: you connect to archaic server
names, the idea of displaying messages as threads will never happen, menus are
counter-intuitive, it's absurdly slow.. I could go on. Ok, so I get that once
your organization has tied to Lotus Notes, the cost of replacing it is absurd
-- especially if you build applications on the platform. What makes no sense
to me is that the visual interface has remained virtually unchanged since I
started using it (Jan '06), and the new Webmail pilot looks just as bad.
There's a lot of things Lotus Notes can't easily improve. But there's just as
many they -can- improve that they don't for some reason.

------
bdr
So is the platypus God's version of Enterprise Software?

------
jodrellblank
A big part of it is that once you get to a system for many tens, hundreds or
more people, the basic requirements are so big that there are no real choices
beyond the main one or two competitors, and one will be ahead for one reason
or another.

Users have no voice, but that's only part of the problem - the time it would
take to evaluate New Competitor C just to cover all the unspoken requirements
is prohibitive. You can be pretty confident that _because they claim_ nice
sounding features and a simple interface, that's proof that they haven't been
around to gain enough of the unspoken requirements - if they had, they
wouldn't have nice sounding features and a simple interface anymore. Bit of a
catch 22, really.

Unspoken requirements in the Windows world are things like "... and has a web
interface", "... works on a terminal server", "reports integrate into central
management program X", "has an Outlook plugin", "tolerable support for user
permissions", "incomprehensible massive logfile", and so on. Either things
that a program which incorporates all of them will be cumbersomly big by
necessity, and/or an established competitor for several years with a few
versions under its belt.

