3 ms·

The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always

by dkrich 11y ago

The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology. That's how Dell and Microsoft Sharepoint still make a lot of money. It's not necessarily a bad thing when taking into account the economics of training IT personnel and the added costs of supporting cutting edge technologies. But I don't think many individual buyers would argue that the 2012 MBP is a better computer in pretty much any way than a 2015 MBP with Retina display.

eitally 11y ago
I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform and offers a lot of pretty spiffy bells & whistles when correctly configured. None of the open source options remotely compare.
- tacos 11y ago
  SharePoint lets you glue together a lot of business process with (gasp) paid software. Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. And somewhere in Burbank there's a couple production companies happy to pay them $1200/seat each for ten people instead of hiring a bunch of devs to rig up or whittle down some open source stuff. Unsurprisingly, the open source crowd neither likes nor understands this tradeoff. SharePoint is sort of a mess, but it's precisely the kind of mess that WordPress is: it's big and dumb and breaks predictably and people know how to deal with it.
  - dkrich 11y ago
    Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. Sharepoint's bread and butter is in Fortune-500 companies' IT departments that use Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard software because they are not in the business of risk. Software is a resource, just like the buildings those companies occupy and the people they employ. It helps them meet a business objective. They do not care what developers think makes them most productive. They care what will minimize IT training and support costs and what will be around in ten years. That is why companies that make their livings off of enterprise sales design their software for C-level execs and IT decision-makers, not low-level developers. It's also why most in-house enterprise software is written in Java and not Ruby. So the point is that, just like for Apple with the 2012 MBP, there is money to be made from those who are risk-averse and see more cost in moving to a new platform than from sticking with what already works. Somewhere there emerged an assumption that no developers understand that there are real P&L driving business decisions underlying the crappy software they are forced to use. I think most people get that, but that the software sucks to use is still an opinion shared by most of the people who use it for hours a day.
    - tacos 11y ago
      It's not just the Fortune 500. That currently cuts off with United Rentals at #500 with 12,000 employees. Lots of small 50+ employee companies use SharePoint. It often works even better for them: they can solve problems by dumbly plucking software out of a catalog and clumsily grow their business processes around best-practices implied by that software. In some future marco.org universe you can apt-get an entire business infrastructure and it all works great provided your MacBooks weigh 1.7 pounds instead of 2.3 with a 220dpi screen instead of 135. In the meantime, small companies tend to be full of people who haven't figured out what the heck they're doing yet and being able to buy an HR application makes a lot more sense than hiring 6 Ruby devs who 1) know nothing about HR 2) don't care about HR and 3) can't learn about HR or even gather specs because the person in charge is the owner's dumb son who doesn't know much about HR yet either.
- dkrich 11y ago
  I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform You seem to have just agreed with me. The Sharepoint vs. open source argument is a straw-man, since I never once mentioned open source. Sharepoint is used by all manner of organization for all manner of tasks. I just recently ran into an organization using it as a CMS platform. Past teams I've been on have used it as a document sharing platform, but even that experience is far from ideal. Sharepoint is used because enterprises are not in the risk business when it comes to software procurement. But for document review and sharing there are a host of better options available. Very few small teams that I've worked on that had their own control over what software they used chose to use Sharepoint of their own volition. Take that as you will.
  - eitally 11y ago
    Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding. I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.
mschuster91 11y ago
> The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology. A end-2011/2012 MBP has more than enough resources to fill most day jobs' needs. Give it an SSD and enough RAM and you can run IDEA just fine as on a brand new one. The only thing that's not really possible is doing video editing or high-res photo editing because the screen is not high-res enough. Unless you're doing one of these two workloads, no need to shell out the double amount of cash if you don't profit from it. Or attach the MBP to an external screen, that works fine too. Oh, also if you have >1k MBPs in service already and you don't want your IT service guys to have them sent to Apple for everything (after all, the guys are expensive and you want something to do for them other than packing Macbooks into parcels), the mentioned MBPs offer the advantage that you can do a LOT of the common stuff (hard disk swapping, battery replacement, RAM upgrades) yourself on these machines. When I had to swap the disk on my work MBP (end 2011) I needed under 5 minutes. Also, enterprises like consistency because it makes spare parts acquisition and user troubleshooting really easy.
- dkrich 11y ago
  Yes, it can be souped-up to be as fast, but the frame is still larger and heavier, and has an inferior display. So, my point still stands that most individual buyers would not prefer a 2012 MBP to a new one that ships with SSD and a retina display. The ability to change out parts does not really matter to most buyers. Yes, I know, some buyers like that ability, just like some like to have a DVD player in 2016. Those concerns are not what make Apple a $700 billion company, but can still bring in a non-trivial amount of profit so I see why they still make them.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    Indeed, but we were talking about enterprises, not private buyers ;)

by dkrich 11y ago

eitally 11y ago

I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform and offers a lot of pretty spiffy bells & whistles when correctly configured. None of the open source options remotely compare.

tacos 11y ago
SharePoint lets you glue together a lot of business process with (gasp) paid software. Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. And somewhere in Burbank there's a couple production companies happy to pay them $1200/seat each for ten people instead of hiring a bunch of devs to rig up or whittle down some open source stuff. Unsurprisingly, the open source crowd neither likes nor understands this tradeoff. SharePoint is sort of a mess, but it's precisely the kind of mess that WordPress is: it's big and dumb and breaks predictably and people know how to deal with it.
- dkrich 11y ago
  Somewhere in Idaho there's a five person dev shop who's really, really worried about making the tool for production companies that have to deliver 30 second radio spots in 40 languages. Sharepoint's bread and butter is in Fortune-500 companies' IT departments that use Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard software because they are not in the business of risk. Software is a resource, just like the buildings those companies occupy and the people they employ. It helps them meet a business objective. They do not care what developers think makes them most productive. They care what will minimize IT training and support costs and what will be around in ten years. That is why companies that make their livings off of enterprise sales design their software for C-level execs and IT decision-makers, not low-level developers. It's also why most in-house enterprise software is written in Java and not Ruby. So the point is that, just like for Apple with the 2012 MBP, there is money to be made from those who are risk-averse and see more cost in moving to a new platform than from sticking with what already works. Somewhere there emerged an assumption that no developers understand that there are real P&L driving business decisions underlying the crappy software they are forced to use. I think most people get that, but that the software sucks to use is still an opinion shared by most of the people who use it for hours a day.
  - tacos 11y ago
    It's not just the Fortune 500. That currently cuts off with United Rentals at #500 with 12,000 employees. Lots of small 50+ employee companies use SharePoint. It often works even better for them: they can solve problems by dumbly plucking software out of a catalog and clumsily grow their business processes around best-practices implied by that software. In some future marco.org universe you can apt-get an entire business infrastructure and it all works great provided your MacBooks weigh 1.7 pounds instead of 2.3 with a 220dpi screen instead of 135. In the meantime, small companies tend to be full of people who haven't figured out what the heck they're doing yet and being able to buy an HR application makes a lot more sense than hiring 6 Ruby devs who 1) know nothing about HR 2) don't care about HR and 3) can't learn about HR or even gather specs because the person in charge is the owner's dumb son who doesn't know much about HR yet either.
dkrich 11y ago
I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform You seem to have just agreed with me. The Sharepoint vs. open source argument is a straw-man, since I never once mentioned open source. Sharepoint is used by all manner of organization for all manner of tasks. I just recently ran into an organization using it as a CMS platform. Past teams I've been on have used it as a document sharing platform, but even that experience is far from ideal. Sharepoint is used because enterprises are not in the risk business when it comes to software procurement. But for document review and sharing there are a host of better options available. Very few small teams that I've worked on that had their own control over what software they used chose to use Sharepoint of their own volition. Take that as you will.
- eitally 11y ago
  Actually, I'm not agreeing at all. I think software (especially extensible platforms) are perfectly allowed to require care & feeding. I also agree that Sharepoint is misused frequently, and that it's totally unsuited to small teams. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about large enterprises, which the GP said is ostensibly why Google bought Bebop.

mschuster91 11y ago

> The short version of this is that there is a lot of money to be made from enterprises by selling them outdated technology because enterprises are almost always slow to adopt new technology. A end-2011/2012 MBP has more than enough resources to fill most day jobs' needs. Give it an SSD and enough RAM and you can run IDEA just fine as on a brand new one. The only thing that's not really possible is doing video editing or high-res photo editing because the screen is not high-res enough. Unless you're doing one of these two workloads, no need to shell out the double amount of cash if you don't profit from it. Or attach the MBP to an external screen, that works fine too. Oh, also if you have >1k MBPs in service already and you don't want your IT service guys to have them sent to Apple for everything (after all, the guys are expensive and you want something to do for them other than packing Macbooks into parcels), the mentioned MBPs offer the advantage that you can do a LOT of the common stuff (hard disk swapping, battery replacement, RAM upgrades) yourself on these machines. When I had to swap the disk on my work MBP (end 2011) I needed under 5 minutes. Also, enterprises like consistency because it makes spare parts acquisition and user troubleshooting really easy.

dkrich 11y ago
Yes, it can be souped-up to be as fast, but the frame is still larger and heavier, and has an inferior display. So, my point still stands that most individual buyers would not prefer a 2012 MBP to a new one that ships with SSD and a retina display. The ability to change out parts does not really matter to most buyers. Yes, I know, some buyers like that ability, just like some like to have a DVD player in 2016. Those concerns are not what make Apple a $700 billion company, but can still bring in a non-trivial amount of profit so I see why they still make them.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  Indeed, but we were talking about enterprises, not private buyers ;)