I have a few observations to add based on my own experience as well. Due to the fact that most enterprise software is developed by those not qualified to get b

I have a few observations to add based on my own experience as well. Due to the fact that most enterprise software is developed by those not qualified to get better jobs, a lot of enterprise software is complex due to bad engineering. The really aren't very many business requirements that are, by themselves, complicated. The complexity comes from a foolish and pointless attempt to deal with all of them at once by developing a framework rather than an application. The sorts of developers that work in enterprises tend to be the sort that don't realize that they're abusing the classic software anti-patterns and making things far worse. Another problem is due to who makes the decisions about what to buy and what the requirements for in-house software are. It's rarely someone who has any connection to the solution, but rather a manager or executive with an agenda, which occasionally has some relation to the software's purpose, but more often has to do with brown-nosing. One example is Visual J++. At one point, Microsoft had gotten Visual J++ into something like 70% of Java development shops in the US. They did this by marketing directly to clueless executives who didn't know the first thing about whether or not it was suitable to the task at hand, rather than to the developers who were in reality using a standard Java JDK and a free (or cheap, back then there were several of both available) IDE instead.