21 ms·

Always when you hear the word "Enterprise" and it's not related to Star Trek it usually means "company that has made it so far and so stable up on the food chai

by erikb 8y ago

Always when you hear the word "Enterprise" and it's not related to Star Trek it usually means "company that has made it so far and so stable up on the food chain that from now on they don't need to work hard anymore". If you have never worked in Enterprise software development, think about putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional". What do you think happens if you hand over a relatively well developed software to such a team? Now let a few years pass and you have today's Skype.

noonespecial 8y ago
>putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional". That had to be the most succinct description of the corporate work environment I've ever encountered. I'm shamelessly stealing that. Well said.
- erikb 8y ago
  no problem, CC-BY-SA.
  - Exuma 8y ago
    Did you just license your phrase?
    - erikb 8y ago
      You can also buy an enterprise license. Just contact our very competent sales team for a quote and NDA.
      - noonespecial 8y ago
        ...they will be wearing costumes, be on drugs, and be dedicated to "professionalism". You will not able to get a quote without a meeting in person to discuss "features and options" of the product in order to "synergize with your existing ERP marketplace strategy".
      - __jal 8y ago
        But what about support? What if I deploy the phrase but experience unexpected results? I think we'll need the one named after your favorite expensive metal.
        erikb 8y ago
        Of course with the Enterprise license you'll get support, meaning we offer you access to a free Web1.0 form, which is much better than an email address because it will completely ignore all your new lines, and we guarantee that we will answer within 24 hours that we are looking into it.
  - drdeca 8y ago
    You want people to note the differences from the version you wrote?
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Can't you creeps ever just let a joke slide?
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Sounds good enough. Bonus points, it will prevent anyone with a significant legal team from using it.
mattmanser 8y ago
Enterprise software is a catch-all term, I worked on enterprise software and none of our customers were bigger than 500 users, most were less than 100. Enterprise software comes in a huge variety of quality.
- munk-a 8y ago
  Enterprise software is a nebulous term, I understand you hear a vague description of large software when you read it. Personally, to me, Enterprise is an entirely negative adjective, implying a software that spends more effort trying to do things it needs to do to support itself than it does trying to solve problems. Enterprise also carries the meaning (again for me) of terribly architected software, possibly designed by someone who read about microservices and took it to the extreme that they've got an AWS lambda for doing strpad.
  - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
    Or in the case of Microsoft, the software has been around since the DOS days and is nothing but legacy kludges. Look at Office for an example. It's a 30-year-old code base and everything about it shows. Office is clearly designed to maximize the number of tick marks marketing can put in their materials, and very little else.
    - fphhotchips 8y ago
      I would argue that Office is one of the least applicable examples here. Software with such a mind-bogglingly large install base would be very difficult to improve, but they keep doing it relatively well. Recent versions of Office are significantly better even than a couple years ago in terms of stability, performance and functionality. Find me a better desktop office suite. I think a lot of the flack Office catches is because of how wide it casts its net. Just because you don't use a piece of functionality doesn't mean that it is bad.
      - ConceptJunkie 8y ago
wirrbel 8y ago
I am pretty sure they had such tests, and they tested everything in their corporate network and maybe uptown where the engineers live.
CountSessine 8y ago
I couldn't agree with this more! What really characterizes 'enterprise software' is that the people selecting and buying it are different people than the people who have to use it. 'enterprise software' is sold to stove-pipe organizations. It can be all sorts of awful for the people who actually have to use it, as long as the people making the purchasing decision come out of the deal looking good. The software vendor isn't set up to be able to iterate and improve based on customer feedback, and their customers aren't set up to be able to offer that feedback. Hence 'enterprise software' remains in a perpetual state of awfulness and anything good about it is purely accidental.
- braythwayt 8y ago
  Exactly. There is a similar phenomenon with hotels. Some hotels cater to people who pay with their own money, others to people on expense accounts. The hotels that cater to people on expense accounts often have what appears to be terrible customer service, but that's only because the "guests" are not the customer, the accounts payable and event management groups are the customers. Those users get great features they care about, like unified billing across multiple groups in multiple locations, &c &c.
  - magduf 8y ago
    Can you specify which hotels are the ones that cater to people on expense accounts please? I've never heard this, but it makes sense and I'd like to avoid those hotels.
    - braythwayt 8y ago
      It used to be that you could apply "The Coffee Test:" When I started my career, the hotels that gave you free coffee (either in the room, or in the lobby) catered to people paying their own way. The hotels that made you call room service and order a $6 cup of instant, plus tip... They catered to corporations. Nowadays almost everyone has some kind of instant coffee machine in the room. It could be that free WiFi is the new marker for quickly delineating one from the other.
braythwayt 8y ago
Amusing, but the issues with Enterprise Software are far more complex than that. Having spent my career working with Enterprises of one sort or another, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. You are not the customer. With ad-driven products, we have painfully realized that if we aren't paying, we aren't the customer, and when something seems awful to us, the explanation often lies in the fact that the thing that is awful to us benefits the real customer, or perhaps that the thing that benefits us is of little value to the real customer compared to things that do not benefit us. The same is true of Enterprise Software. Most users are not the software's customer, and therefore their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it. 2. Pricing-Driven Development As Spolsky famously pointed out, Enterprises forcibly impose an insane cost-of-sales on software vendors. When you have to employ expensive salespeople, prepare proposals, apocryphally play golf with clients, or whatever, vendors must build those costs into the cost of the product. Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values. Typically these are not going to be things that make users' lives easier, they are going to be things that users may never see, like analytics and back-office integrations. Like the "you are not the customer" problem above, this tends to create the illusion that the software sucks and that the vendor isn't improving it. In actual fact, the vendor is locked into a Red Queen's Race with competing vendors, and is improving the software constantly. It's just that users never benefit from the improvements, because UX improvements are not thought to "move the needle."
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  >their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it. Are you implying people are paying for dropped calls and poor performance as a feature?
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    I'm implying that sometimes, "Improve ability to handle scale as measured by X improvement in dropped calls and Y improvement in user-reported call quality" is always going to be in the backlog, but it is probably being starved by other initiatives like "Support integration with BigClient Internal System Z." That's a scenario where the needs of the people making and receiving calls are subordinate to the needs of the people paying for Skype.
eksemplar 8y ago
Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. Further than that I can find, chat with or call my counterparts from our neighboring municipalities as though they were from our own. We also frequently use it for video meetings on our Microsoft surface (or whatever that 80” touch screen thing is called) and it works like a charm. Private or normal Skype is one of the worst apps I’ve tried in 2018 though. I wonder if it’s because they tore out the peer-to-peer stuff that made Skype great in the oldendays and replaced it with azure.
- pidg 8y ago
  Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    > I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.
    - woobar 8y ago
      The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    This has not been my experience with SfB From "robot voice" to poor sound quality to randomly dropped calls, to screen shares not working, have been a daily occurrence for me.
    - badpun 8y ago
tbourne 8y ago
I think the issue here is that when Microsoft purchased Skype and decided to fold it into their Office product, the customer fundamentally changed. They used the market share of the name to carry the product to a new customer base. Unfortunately the existing customer base was alienated. This definitely isn't the first time (and won't be the last) this has happened in the industry. It's always sad when it does, but it also always opens a door for a new company to create a product that fills the void.

by erikb 8y ago

noonespecial 8y ago

>putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional". That had to be the most succinct description of the corporate work environment I've ever encountered. I'm shamelessly stealing that. Well said.

erikb 8y ago
no problem, CC-BY-SA.
- Exuma 8y ago
  Did you just license your phrase?
  - erikb 8y ago
    You can also buy an enterprise license. Just contact our very competent sales team for a quote and NDA.
    - noonespecial 8y ago
      ...they will be wearing costumes, be on drugs, and be dedicated to "professionalism". You will not able to get a quote without a meeting in person to discuss "features and options" of the product in order to "synergize with your existing ERP marketplace strategy".
    - __jal 8y ago
      But what about support? What if I deploy the phrase but experience unexpected results? I think we'll need the one named after your favorite expensive metal.
      - erikb 8y ago
        Of course with the Enterprise license you'll get support, meaning we offer you access to a free Web1.0 form, which is much better than an email address because it will completely ignore all your new lines, and we guarantee that we will answer within 24 hours that we are looking into it.
- drdeca 8y ago
  You want people to note the differences from the version you wrote?
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Can't you creeps ever just let a joke slide?
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Sounds good enough. Bonus points, it will prevent anyone with a significant legal team from using it.

mattmanser 8y ago

Enterprise software is a catch-all term, I worked on enterprise software and none of our customers were bigger than 500 users, most were less than 100. Enterprise software comes in a huge variety of quality.

munk-a 8y ago
Enterprise software is a nebulous term, I understand you hear a vague description of large software when you read it. Personally, to me, Enterprise is an entirely negative adjective, implying a software that spends more effort trying to do things it needs to do to support itself than it does trying to solve problems. Enterprise also carries the meaning (again for me) of terribly architected software, possibly designed by someone who read about microservices and took it to the extreme that they've got an AWS lambda for doing strpad.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Or in the case of Microsoft, the software has been around since the DOS days and is nothing but legacy kludges. Look at Office for an example. It's a 30-year-old code base and everything about it shows. Office is clearly designed to maximize the number of tick marks marketing can put in their materials, and very little else.
  - fphhotchips 8y ago
    I would argue that Office is one of the least applicable examples here. Software with such a mind-bogglingly large install base would be very difficult to improve, but they keep doing it relatively well. Recent versions of Office are significantly better even than a couple years ago in terms of stability, performance and functionality. Find me a better desktop office suite. I think a lot of the flack Office catches is because of how wide it casts its net. Just because you don't use a piece of functionality doesn't mean that it is bad.
    - ConceptJunkie 8y ago

wirrbel 8y ago

I am pretty sure they had such tests, and they tested everything in their corporate network and maybe uptown where the engineers live.

CountSessine 8y ago

I couldn't agree with this more! What really characterizes 'enterprise software' is that the people selecting and buying it are different people than the people who have to use it. 'enterprise software' is sold to stove-pipe organizations. It can be all sorts of awful for the people who actually have to use it, as long as the people making the purchasing decision come out of the deal looking good. The software vendor isn't set up to be able to iterate and improve based on customer feedback, and their customers aren't set up to be able to offer that feedback. Hence 'enterprise software' remains in a perpetual state of awfulness and anything good about it is purely accidental.

braythwayt 8y ago
Exactly. There is a similar phenomenon with hotels. Some hotels cater to people who pay with their own money, others to people on expense accounts. The hotels that cater to people on expense accounts often have what appears to be terrible customer service, but that's only because the "guests" are not the customer, the accounts payable and event management groups are the customers. Those users get great features they care about, like unified billing across multiple groups in multiple locations, &c &c.
- magduf 8y ago
  Can you specify which hotels are the ones that cater to people on expense accounts please? I've never heard this, but it makes sense and I'd like to avoid those hotels.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    It used to be that you could apply "The Coffee Test:" When I started my career, the hotels that gave you free coffee (either in the room, or in the lobby) catered to people paying their own way. The hotels that made you call room service and order a $6 cup of instant, plus tip... They catered to corporations. Nowadays almost everyone has some kind of instant coffee machine in the room. It could be that free WiFi is the new marker for quickly delineating one from the other.

braythwayt 8y ago

Amusing, but the issues with Enterprise Software are far more complex than that. Having spent my career working with Enterprises of one sort or another, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. You are not the customer. With ad-driven products, we have painfully realized that if we aren't paying, we aren't the customer, and when something seems awful to us, the explanation often lies in the fact that the thing that is awful to us benefits the real customer, or perhaps that the thing that benefits us is of little value to the real customer compared to things that do not benefit us. The same is true of Enterprise Software. Most users are not the software's customer, and therefore their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it. 2. Pricing-Driven Development As Spolsky famously pointed out, Enterprises forcibly impose an insane cost-of-sales on software vendors. When you have to employ expensive salespeople, prepare proposals, apocryphally play golf with clients, or whatever, vendors must build those costs into the cost of the product. Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values. Typically these are not going to be things that make users' lives easier, they are going to be things that users may never see, like analytics and back-office integrations. Like the "you are not the customer" problem above, this tends to create the illusion that the software sucks and that the vendor isn't improving it. In actual fact, the vendor is locked into a Red Queen's Race with competing vendors, and is improving the software constantly. It's just that users never benefit from the improvements, because UX improvements are not thought to "move the needle."

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
>their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it. Are you implying people are paying for dropped calls and poor performance as a feature?
- braythwayt 8y ago
  I'm implying that sometimes, "Improve ability to handle scale as measured by X improvement in dropped calls and Y improvement in user-reported call quality" is always going to be in the backlog, but it is probably being starved by other initiatives like "Support integration with BigClient Internal System Z." That's a scenario where the needs of the people making and receiving calls are subordinate to the needs of the people paying for Skype.

eksemplar 8y ago

Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. Further than that I can find, chat with or call my counterparts from our neighboring municipalities as though they were from our own. We also frequently use it for video meetings on our Microsoft surface (or whatever that 80” touch screen thing is called) and it works like a charm. Private or normal Skype is one of the worst apps I’ve tried in 2018 though. I wonder if it’s because they tore out the peer-to-peer stuff that made Skype great in the oldendays and replaced it with azure.

pidg 8y ago
Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  > I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.
  - woobar 8y ago
    The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  This has not been my experience with SfB From "robot voice" to poor sound quality to randomly dropped calls, to screen shares not working, have been a daily occurrence for me.
  - badpun 8y ago

tbourne 8y ago

I think the issue here is that when Microsoft purchased Skype and decided to fold it into their Office product, the customer fundamentally changed. They used the market share of the name to carry the product to a new customer base. Unfortunately the existing customer base was alienated. This definitely isn't the first time (and won't be the last) this has happened in the industry. It's always sad when it does, but it also always opens a door for a new company to create a product that fills the void.