4 ms·
> Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compres
by duderific 11y ago
> Enterprise sales people can make a habit of selling things that the product can't currently do, and then forcing engineering to make it a reality on a compressed timeline because "this is a deal we can't afford to lose."
A million times this. I currently work at an enterprise software firm, and this is exactly what happens with each new client.
In addition to the compressed timelines and ridiculous feature requests that must be honored... in terms of the product itself, you have to do one of the following:
1) Maintain separate codebases for each client, or
2) Build the application so it can handle different features for each client, since each client will want different things.
Neither course of action is nearly as pleasant as having products that are the same for all customers.
- douche 11y ago3.) The ball of spaghetti rolls downhill, agglobulating ALL THE FEATURES, along with forty-seven hundred switches and configuration options controlling them, resulting in a combinatorial explosion of possible system states and code paths, and you end up with something that sends email, has a social feed, group chat rooms, a home-brew scripting language, some half-baked custom charting and reporting, theming and customization options, and no idea what in the hell you originally set out to build. Oh, and dashboards. People love dashboards for some reason.
- randycupertino 11y agoI think you just summed up why no one's been able to kill off craigslist. CL kept it simple, stuck to what they did best and hardly added any features.
- dbeardsl 11y agoAnd restricted access to their data + cease-and-desisted anyone who wanted to augment the CL experience. They're still in business because they are shrewd and have the critical mass required to maintain their monopoly, not because they have a killer product.
- sangnoir 11y agoI find it hard to find fault anyone who resists 3rd parties attempting to Embrace and Extend ("augment") their product. It is pretty obvious to me that getting disintermediated from your users lowers the value you offer & makes you a disposable part of the stack: as soon as the 'augmenters' become popular enough, they'd replace CL with a home-grown solution
- throwaway__2016 11y agoI'm impressed, it's almost an exact description of the product in my company, only thing we don't have (yet) is group chat rooms. And yes it's pretty horrible experience developer wise.