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Funny how word 'Enterprise' picks up more and more negative connotation in modern software world. These days, 'enterprise' means outdated, inflexible and intent

Funny how word 'Enterprise' picks up more and more negative connotation in modern software world. These days, 'enterprise' means outdated, inflexible and intentionally flawed monster of technology.

trhway 8y ago
dont forget the enterprise processes (in software for example it would be Agile/Scrum/Lean/Six Sigma/etc.) and the enterprise people deformed by them. Archaeologically speaking it is a whole culture layer :)
- setquk 8y ago
  Ugh. I’ve been shafted by all of those ideologies. It turned me grey, bald and cynical aka experienced in every possible way to fuck something up. That turned out to be quite valuable!
bitwize 8y ago
I find a useful definition of "enterprise" is this: products or services whose customers are several levels up the org chart from their users.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  It's even simpler than that: Enterprise just means the people paying for the software are not its users. This is why enterprise software always sucks.
pjmlp 8y ago
Did it ever meant anything else? Many that throw jabs at J2EE (written on purpose), never had the joys of trying out xBaseEE, CEE, C++EE (CORBA, DCOM/MTS),...
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  Sure, ~20 years ago Sun Microsystems used to sell some "Ultra Enterprise" servers which offered nice reliability features like redundant power supplies and a backplane and slot setup where you could install several CPU/memory boards or I/O boards. In comparison to some of their other hardware, these servers were more suited to organizations with more demanding needs like minimizing downtime or having lots of compute power or configuration flexibility. But of course people quickly realized that a key characteristic of actual enterprise computing is large budgets, so it almost immediately turned into a game of labeling things with the word "enterprise" in hopes of vacuuming up as much of that money as possible.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  I think it’s an unfair characterisation. Let’s go with early-2000s “Enterprise” stuff: CORBA and SOAP specifically. There are these large corporations with a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and systems - and now they all need to make them interop. The mindset is “how do we make our CORBA ERP communicate with their Java CRM without needing to make any changes to either of them?”. Hence SOAP: It packages existing method-call semantics into a HTTP message that will cross a firewall: not even the IT dept needs to get involved to change firewall rules. And they hammered out a working spec within a couple years. That’s impressive considering the slow-moving nature of large, risk-averse enterprises. We now know that REST-is-Best, but it took the industry around 10 years to figure that out, and another 5 years for the tooling and ecosystem to catch up. SOAP was a quick-fix that was needed immediately. So I’d recharacterise “Enterprise software” as “fits into your existing system and does what you need it to, right now” - and their MC Escher-inspired architecture is a consequence of it needing to support and fit-in to whatever systems were prevalent when their project was started. It’s not Enterprise software that’s rigid and inflexible - but cutting-edge software that I have more problems with. I was working with Neo4j in 2016 and having issues with security because it didn’t have any built-in security support until last year. I had to change what I was doing to accommodate them, instead of vice-versa.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    IT ... the glue that halts technology's progress.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Also "industry standard" in this industry means "lowest-common-denominator garbage, for which you can find a lot of cheap programmers".

Funny how word 'Enterprise' picks up more and more negative connotation in modern software world. These days, 'enterprise' means outdated, inflexible and intentionally flawed monster of technology.

trhway 8y ago

dont forget the enterprise processes (in software for example it would be Agile/Scrum/Lean/Six Sigma/etc.) and the enterprise people deformed by them. Archaeologically speaking it is a whole culture layer :)

setquk 8y ago
Ugh. I’ve been shafted by all of those ideologies. It turned me grey, bald and cynical aka experienced in every possible way to fuck something up. That turned out to be quite valuable!

bitwize 8y ago

I find a useful definition of "enterprise" is this: products or services whose customers are several levels up the org chart from their users.

dreamcompiler 8y ago
It's even simpler than that: Enterprise just means the people paying for the software are not its users. This is why enterprise software always sucks.

pjmlp 8y ago

Did it ever meant anything else? Many that throw jabs at J2EE (written on purpose), never had the joys of trying out xBaseEE, CEE, C++EE (CORBA, DCOM/MTS),...

adrianmonk 8y ago
Sure, ~20 years ago Sun Microsystems used to sell some "Ultra Enterprise" servers which offered nice reliability features like redundant power supplies and a backplane and slot setup where you could install several CPU/memory boards or I/O boards. In comparison to some of their other hardware, these servers were more suited to organizations with more demanding needs like minimizing downtime or having lots of compute power or configuration flexibility. But of course people quickly realized that a key characteristic of actual enterprise computing is large budgets, so it almost immediately turned into a game of labeling things with the word "enterprise" in hopes of vacuuming up as much of that money as possible.
DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
I think it’s an unfair characterisation. Let’s go with early-2000s “Enterprise” stuff: CORBA and SOAP specifically. There are these large corporations with a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and systems - and now they all need to make them interop. The mindset is “how do we make our CORBA ERP communicate with their Java CRM without needing to make any changes to either of them?”. Hence SOAP: It packages existing method-call semantics into a HTTP message that will cross a firewall: not even the IT dept needs to get involved to change firewall rules. And they hammered out a working spec within a couple years. That’s impressive considering the slow-moving nature of large, risk-averse enterprises. We now know that REST-is-Best, but it took the industry around 10 years to figure that out, and another 5 years for the tooling and ecosystem to catch up. SOAP was a quick-fix that was needed immediately. So I’d recharacterise “Enterprise software” as “fits into your existing system and does what you need it to, right now” - and their MC Escher-inspired architecture is a consequence of it needing to support and fit-in to whatever systems were prevalent when their project was started. It’s not Enterprise software that’s rigid and inflexible - but cutting-edge software that I have more problems with. I was working with Neo4j in 2016 and having issues with security because it didn’t have any built-in security support until last year. I had to change what I was doing to accommodate them, instead of vice-versa.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  IT ... the glue that halts technology's progress.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Also "industry standard" in this industry means "lowest-common-denominator garbage, for which you can find a lot of cheap programmers".