Why is enterprise software so bad

More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. Sapho wants to resolve that enterprise mobile app barrier. Requirements also change over time and PMs can end up chasing a vision that doesn't exist.

If PMs get out of their bubble and acknowledge this more they'd be trusted since there would be alignment on the long-term value for the customer and therefore sales. There are times that PMs need to show backbone when dealing with sales, or leadership, on features that might derail the product, but this doesn't have to be the default.

Lol, let's be realistic. If a PM is in the situation to decide that and does so, in a few days he'll find himself in a meeting with some higher ups to discuss how to find a way. Unless of course 10k is insignificant for the company and there's already a hard roadmap for higher value projects. Leave out specific features and you lose entire industries. Incentives are not aligned for enterprise software authors to lose entire industries.

I'd refine your examples somewhat. A client-server model type of software data lives in big central corporate databases instead of being documents-oriented user data lives in files like. And in the workplace, a lot of analysts like using MS Excel.

I had the same reaction. I was wondering, "Since when are Word, Excel, and Photoshop enterprise software? That said, I do agree with GP that enterprise software is complex because it's designed to be adaptable to existing processes, whereas simpler software seeks to adapt the user to its prescribed process. And even without being an enterprise, I often find myself drawn to software that adapts to my needs and preferences rather than the other way around. Just because the advent of mobile-focused product sensibility has seen a regrettable, in my opinion general drift toward significantly reduced feature sets in software does not mean that existing software with broad feature sets is now "enterprise.

That sort of flexibility was among the first features on the mobile simplification chopping block. As a result, most software created within the past few years has a single "true and good" color scheme dictated by the designer.

Today we see that evolving slightly with the popularity of "dark" schemes, giving the user a choice between two, but only two, designer-crafted themes. Since Word 1. Why do you think it is called Microsoft Office? That's not consumer software. Some friendly fyi of MS history Microsoft didn't use the "Office" branding until Before that, the computer industry called it "productivity software" instead of "enterprise software".

In the s, Microsoft Word was competing with WordStar and WordPerfect and those were all consumer software for personal computers. Consumers could go into an office supply store and buy shrinkwrapped boxes of those software titles. They didn't need a purchase order from corporate accounting to buy an "enterprise volume license". Yes, a Fortune corporation today can buy a enterprise volume licenses of MS Office or Office cloud subscription but MS Word's roots definitely included the consumer sector.

I don't think the example of MS Word fits the author's idea of "enterprise" software. T-hawk on Oct 11, root parent next [—]. There was also Microsoft Works, which was Microsoft's first integrated word processor, spreadsheet, and database. That was the low-cost consumer-level package for quite a while. It was often OEM-bundled, in hopes of eventually inducing users to buy into Office proper. Works was sold as late as before being retired in favor of Office instead.

Microsoft Office was first introduced for the Mac in and for Windows a year later. Mathnerd on Oct 11, root parent prev next [—]. The shift was in computers, from enterprise to consumer, and the software followed. A bulk buy for enterprise would be cheaper. You can see why MS create a new version every few years; but why do offices keep buying it.

When people say "Enterprise Software" they are not talking about shrink-wrap single-user office productivity applications like word processors and spreadsheets. Maybe there should be another term to help clarify for people who don't understand the difference, but the difference really should be obvious from context. In the workplace, people like using MS Excel because the alternatives are ridiculously inferior. I would say that its because people understand how to use it. Excel is frequently used as a database, not because it makes a good database but because people don't understand how to use Access or any other relational database but Excel is easy enough that they can get something usable.

That's part of it, but not all and also not the most important IMHO Excel clones simply don't cover the breadth of functionality provided by the OG, not to mention key UX features like countless hotkeys and menu accelerators Every Excel user understands Google Sheets. They just don't like feeling like they're strapped to a wheelchair.

Often they understand Access, they just don't have it. Because it costs few hundred more for just Access and Skype, most workers will get the Standard one. You actually need to understand the basics of relational databases in order to use Access effectively unless you are only using a single table - in which case you might as well use excel.

Many people don't need complex features of Excel, LibreOffice is pretty good. Many people have Excel and don't even get to basic functions like vlookup, nevermind anything that is actually lacking from other applications. Yes, I certainly wouldn't call Office enterprise software. But there are enterprise versions of Word, Excel, and a few others. And it's worth taking a look at what those versions add. By and large, being able to centrally manage and update from the IT department, and even being able to deploy additional content plug-ins, templates, etc.

So, they're not client-server, but they do add a server into the mix. The other common set of features is related to distribution and access. Encryption, workflow management, integration into server-hosted software, etc. At a certain point, I think that enterprise software development starts to look like enterprise IT consulting. MS Word is a Word Processor. Its purpose is to input and format text. Excel is a spreadsheet.

It's purpose is to be an interactive way to organize data in tables. Mentioning them as an example of "Enterprise Software" without specifically clarifying the Enterprise-features you're talking about is a mistake at best and disingenuous at worst.

Enterprises don't have complex and unique workflows, they generally have lazy and shitty workflows because people don't care. The reason why enterprise software sucks is many-fold. My top reasons are the following: 1 Enterprise customers spend a lot of money and thus demand a lot from its suppliers.

Sales and PMs and VPs will do whatever it takes to make their numbers and make their bonuses, so they will sacrifice software architecture for customer happiness. I'm not saying this is wrong, but it's the reality. Imagine writing a book where the authors change every years, and the incentive was to write the best chapter and then leave afterwards.

By the end of the book, it's probably going to be a shitty book. The only pieces of software where it works are things like operating systems like Linux where you have someone like Linus who really does care and has been around since the beginning. Even Microsoft fell into this trap, look at Windows Vista which was a disaster. I don't buy it. I've worked at a Fortune company with "complex and unique workflows", and we used plenty of customized enterprise software, and they were the worst systems you ever saw -- both before and after our customizations were implemented.

The best ones were those where we completely replaced the native UI, and the only reason we weren't running our software against a plain database is legacy momentum.

You're either so big you're essentially doing custom development or should be , or you're small enough you can't afford that and use whatever you're given with minimal tweaks to the UI. I believe it's possible to make software that's both good, and flexible enough to stay good while avoiding complete custom development, but it's incredibly rare, because the 'users' in that case i. I would say yes and no. It's true that enterprises have complex and unique workflows, and that this drives the complexity of enterprise software.

What I doubt is that this complexity is actually adding value in most cases. There is a nice equilibrium where companies adopt simple best practice workflows for non-core competencies, and vendors compete on how effectively they can implement those simple workflows. In reality, we're stuck in the equilibrium where companies cling to baroque workflows for everything, and vendors compete to support those workflows, sacrificing ease of use, implementation time, and agility. PeterisP on Oct 11, root parent next [—].

Thing is, enterprises have multiple incompatible workflows but still need to make it work. Of course that's bad and a single system is highly desired - so the company is working on it, and within a year these three workflows are going to be combined in a single system.

Naturally, that system isn't simple as it needs to combine the peculiarities of these three workflows. Of course that's bad, and a single simpler workflow is highly desired - so the company is working on it, and within years the processes are going to be adjusted and unified so that there's a reasonable single process. However, there's another acquisition that's going to be finalized soon, and during these years at least one more is going to happen, so by the time these workflows are unified and simplified, they will be joined by new parts of the company using different workflows, and the enterprise will be back to square one with 3 separate systems with incompatible workflows for doing the same thing.

Oh, I'm aware. I work in enterprise software. I see what the customers want. I've also been on the receiving end: my company has one tool that doesn't work well. So for three years, there's been a push to get rid of it, but there's never been agreement on any replacement.

There's one particular use case that stakeholders think isn't handled by the replacements. The result is that we use both tools, and manually synchronize them.

Someone wrote a bespoke automated tool to bridge those two SaaS apps, but it doesn't remove the manual synchronization, just reduces it. Oh, these tools? They aren't for something low touch. People are in both tools constantly. There are questions about which pieces of information are accurate, and who's responsible for which updates.

The time waste is significant. But the problem isn't the software. The problem is that people can't make a decision. When you ask someone higher up, you get vague assurances that we're still thinking about the issue. In the case of the companies with their mergers, having one tool support both systems isn't doing anyone any favors.

It just lets them limp along with excess complexity. Enterprises are setup to support all of these baroque workflows and that's where most of the value is derived. However users and the business don't get that value, and the project to replace the previous one will deliver "value" to IT stakeholders. The cycle repeats. You have enterprise architects who in the worst case are creating uncertainty by supporting different factions and introducing new tools which interest them versus meeting goals for the company.

IT outsourcing vendors are responsible for the implementation and frequently do a less than stellar job. Security are split between trying to keep tabs on how the outsourcer is running things, while trying to limit how much damage business areas do by just delivering their own solution with SaaS or a small vendor. This is a real mess that requires huge amounts of energy, and is hard to fix because everyone is doing pretty well from it in their own way.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that Unix itself is also incredibly successful both in a commercial and mindshare perspective the items in that list are not necessarily commensurate. Yes, they all have lots of features, but Excel and Photoshop were definitely built for their users, whereas SAP was not so much. My thesis is that Excel and Photoshop were built around empowering the workflows of individual users.

As such, it becomes possible to market directly to the users, even if someone else ends up writing the check. There's no single user you sell the software to that will benefit from using the software independent of what other people are using. Also, the Unix philosophy isn't about limited functionality - it's about achieving rich functionality by having orthogonal bits of functionality that can be composed together in new and unexpected ways that can be reasoned about. Likewise, we may look at Excel as an application and deem it to be overly complex.

However, as a platform Excel is fantastic in that it has lots of independent pieces of functionality that can be easily combined together. Goladus on Oct 11, parent prev next [—]. This is the nominal reason executives responsible for inflicting terrible software on their workers tell themselves.

But it's not always true. In fact it may often not be true. In many cases the assumptions about how much training is necessary to use the software are all wrong in the first place and the only reason so much training is required is because they chose such terrible software in the first place. No, in fact it's often that they LACK features and are NOT properly configurable, because they are simply bad software from the very core. You often have a rigid and unwieldy platform with features inelegantly bolted on by underpaid programmers to satisfy corporate buzzword checklists.

The end-user experience is furthermore left for last. So not only are you trying to design a UI on a garbage platform, it's your lowest priority. So worker efficiency takes a hit, a hit that you can't measure so you just dismiss and issue beatings to anyone who doesn't use your awfully-designed software effectively.

For a real-life example: Good Trouble Ticketing Software designed around trying to help teams track work and be more efficient: Request Tracker from Best Practical. I think this gets it fundamentally correct, although your point has some validity. But the reason that enterprises often wish to pay for configuration of the software instead of changing their own workflows, is that one of these requires no work from them the decision makers , and the other does.

Much of what is called "enterprise software" is actually more like a proprietary programming language or framework, which you will have to pay specialists to program your application in, with bad debugging tools. Lastly, Oracle and SAP and etc. They're just good at selling their software to the decision makers not the users. People love excel and Photoshop. Half of the people I know who love Excel in that way would now be making significantly more money if they didn't.

These people fall into two groups: The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow.

If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now. The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up. On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago.

The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well. They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.

A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair. You said "half of the people.. I assume the subgrouping applies to that same half?

The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants Yeah, perhaps I should have been explicit about the fact that for some people it's absolutely the right tool for the job.

My mom loves it, it serves her well, and her use cases don't require her to go beyond its capabilities. But if fully half admittedly a subjective assessment on my part of a tool's users would be better served by not using that tool for one reason or another--that's a pretty significant subset. Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for years and years!

Yes, Excel really is a good product. But there are a few things people do consistently complain about with it in my experience: - lack of forwards compatibility. Sometimes these bugs only appear on certain versions of Excel - lack of decent built in formula tracing ie something which brings up a dialogue and you can click through each reference in a formula browsing back and forth and going up and down the dependency tree. There are a few third party add one that do this but it really should be built in.

You want an older version to support all new features. That's not possible unless you just change the ui on each version. If you're going to break compatibility, at least fucking fix the dates. In any event, it should be able to fail gracefully ie still load the sheet but not be able to calculate cells using new features and show a warning.

The great thing about Excel is that it is easy and intuitive to use just the basics, and it is difficult to accidentally stumble onto its advanced and complicated features by accident. With Word, on the other hand, it is easy to have created a large document and then just as easily screw the whole thing up from beginning to end by clicking the wrong button or key-combination.

AJ on Oct 11, root parent prev next [—]. Yeah that was a very bizarre grouping of software. There is a lot of bad enterprise software out there, Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP are basically catalogs of it. Good software, the user can bail at any time. Regarding Excel, its Mac version is terrible. Our heavy users have to run the Windows version in a dedicated Parallels VM to get anything done once the sheet contains more than a few hundred rows. I really don't miss excel at all. Tsarbomb on Oct 11, root parent prev next [—].

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

Somewhat unrelated story, but it shows how well loved some software is, and how some users will take it to use cases you never imagined. Somebody needs to get over himself. But if Google Sheets can't fit the data they are using, it is by definition "big data", even if it's not Big Data. I think this over-protectiveness of the definition doesn't really serve anyone.

It serves everyone to have relatively stable meanings for words and phrases. But if today I write "big data" and it means "millions of rows in Excel" to Bob but "hundreds or thousands of terrabytes" to Jane, it's effectively useless to use in communication. Put another way, that Bob thinks he's dealing with "big data" doesn't mean he is in fact. I'm disappointed. I'd like to invite you to produce a higher level of discourse.

This is an incredibly over the top reaction to a very mild reply. Not to mention that telling me you're disappointed in me and inviting me to "produce a higher level of discourse" is far more arrogant and patronising than anything in my original statement. But anyway, this is very obviously off-topic. I don't think it serves the wider community to continue this conversation so I'll leave it here. Well, I'm certainly guilty of the same offense!

That's more RAM than my cellphone has, but less disk than my laptop. Right, if it's only millions of records, why can't Google sheets accommodate it.

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

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

Yeah me too, I find MS Word very useful too tbh. Not sure why higher level comment thinks people hate them. Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Not a single word makes sense anymore. Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale.

This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI. I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic. Wait, really? Udik on Oct 11, root parent next [—]. Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use.

It's definitely not a tool for developers. People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well.

Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages. The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing.

We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever.

So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language. That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English. Like what even comes close in terms of features and fit? And that is too new. I really would say your just restating the OP conclusion from the point of the of the purchaser instead of from the point of view of the software developer.

An executive at an Enterprise would state their search for some piece of software as: I have such and such problem. I wish someone would make a magic wand and fix it for me how hard can it be anyway. To which some software developer will reply. Hey we make magic wands. We make incredible magic wands. Let's schedule some time to show them to you. And the fact that the people who have to use it are not involved makes a huge difference in quality.

If these are examples of Enterprise Software they are by far the best examples of such Software. All of these have horrible documentation, are extremely expensive, and most have superior open source equivalents. The only reason that companies like this can still stay in business is because there are executives who still believe in magic wands and then believe sales people when they say they have them for sale. Juliate on Oct 11, parent prev next [—]. The thing is Rather, they are stuck with it.

On one hand, you have purchase departments that are not the target users, and decide only based on paper reports, what to purchase. Losing the run from the start line.

That's a given. Because regulations. Financial due diligences. And why would they not prefer that? They anyone, we do not care. We are not paid to care for that. Or rather, we get rapidly burnt for caring.

Oracle, for instance but that's valid for so many, if not all, enterprise-targeted solutions , didn't sell itself based on technical merits, you know. Business are complicated, yes. And they get even more complicated because of people lacking of the courage to say fuck you to the salesman. My current theory is that enterprise software vendors have no taste. There is no taste in companies [sic] DNA, nobody cares about design and aesthetic.

Nobody, you guys. Literally nobody. It sure seems like a logical conclusion: product bad, therefore product person bad. This is not a problem in the consumer market, where the person who gives you money is usually also the person who uses your product. So long as the first order of business is security and administration, often taken to wacky extremes, rather than creativity and user-friendliness, it's unclear how anything will change. Perhaps this is a generational shift. Just as President Obama chafed at having his BlackBerry pulled , perhaps we're entering an age where a new crop of CIOs will arise that demand that ease of use be as important as security, for example.

It's not a matter of scrapping the "enterprise" in "enterprise software," but rather of shifting the argument to insist on considering enterprises as agglomerations of people, not droids. And perhaps, just perhaps, open source can make things better by blurring the lines between developer and vendor, and developer and user.