21 ms·

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made

• Goladus 7y ago
  Exactly right, even to the point of bringing up a few specific industries that do in fact have specialized needs.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    But when the enterprise software authors want to capture 100% of the marketplace, they are, of course, writing their offering to support those few specific industries. ... which adds features to the product as a whole, which other customers will need to be aware of and might take advantage of.
    • alistairSH 7y ago
      Heck, even within my niche corner of the enterprise world (coincidentally a similar niche as Blackboard), there's always a noisy client who demands X. I can make all the good-faith arguments about why X really isn't needed, but if that client is threatening to go to a different vendor or sue, X is getting built. As a developer, there's only so much I can do before an account executive or C-suite tells me to quite bitching and just do it (and more often than not, they don't disagree with me in principle, but money makes the world go around).
      • Goladus 7y ago
        Despite what it seems, demand for features is really NOT why enterprise software is (so often) bad. The problem is how easy it is to SELL fundamentally bad software simply because you can tick a box saying it has the feature. Yes, I too have seen the phenomenon of having too many people demanding features where the result turns out to be an incoherent mess. But I also know that if the massive amount of time and money that had been spent purchasing a box-ticking Enterprise Software Solution and subsequently hammering the awkward, unwieldy platform into some semblance of working order had been spent instead on direct improvements to the existing workflow software, then everyone would have been much more satisfied. And yeah I know I shouldn't speak hypothetically but you'll just have to decide to trust me on this or not.
        • shadowgovt 7y ago
          I think you're absolutely right. One error some organizations make is trying to buy a COTS product they assume will be simpler and more robust (and have its bugs fixed "for free" by the developer of the product) over hiring a part-time or full-time staffer to maintain and improve their existing non-COTS workflow (including owning all the bugs). Sometimes (I have no global numbers to even guess at how often), they end up discovering that the COTS product requires expert-level configuration and administration anyway and now they're footing the bill for someone else's licensed solution and a staffer to understand it and make it work.
    • Goladus 7y ago
      They aren't, though. If the big "Enterprise Software" players like Salesforce and SAP sell to healthcare providers it's either not with their flagship products, or else it's with incidental business processes not related to their core and peculiar requirements.
• Plyphon_ 7y ago
  In enterprise the incentives are all wrong - individuals who are decision makers for enterprise software/networking/security/etc have an incentive to make their job as complicated as possible so they can be promoted or build their empire through hiring new resource to keep on top of the complex web they've built
  • pault 7y ago
    This is something I see all the time when a new developer comes on board with stars in their eyes. The first thing they try to do when they see a glaring inefficiency is fix it. Then they get burned at the stake because the inefficiency they are publicly denouncing is the reason a whole team of people exist. Large portions of every enterprise are essentially parasitic.
    • jimmyvalmer 7y ago
      My nether regions shuddered upon reading this. Thank you. Now bring on the flagging.
• mfer 7y ago
  Enterprise software is a sub-class of business software. Enterprises often operate quite differently from SMBs. Public US companies will have things like SOX compliance. And, the enterprises offering up services, like email, may be competitors in another space. If you are competing with Google on phones do you want them to host your email? Likely not. The business world is complex. Some complex business software is fantastic. For example Excel. It's complex but you can do amazing things with data without learning to program (which is most people). You can use it while being on or off the Internet (this is great on a plane). For UX many have given up security features. Many of us now have free credit monitoring because that lack of security has lead to leaks everywhere. I know people who have had their identity stolen and even attacks on retirement funds all due to companies lacking in security. Our drive for the new shiny has left many vulnerable.
  • lmm 7y ago
    > For UX many have given up security features. Many of us now have free credit monitoring because that lack of security has lead to leaks everywhere. I know people who have had their identity stolen and even attacks on retirement funds all due to companies lacking in security. Our drive for the new shiny has left many vulnerable. I would lay money that far more security vulnerabilities are due to overcomplicated customizability features than are due to simplified UX.
    • mfer 7y ago
      I would argue it's more complicated than that. In my experience, especially I started working for some enterprises, the people who make the complex software are also the ones putting in the time and care into security. It's not a causation but there is something to be said about culture.
  • Justin_K 7y ago
    Another big gotcha that hits large public organizations is that the software must be ADA compliant. This is extremely difficult and expensive to meet. Most small vendors do not meet the minimum requirements or even consider doing so.
• shadowgovt 7y ago
  It's worth noting that outlier in size or organization-count may not be outlier in money, and money talks when designing enterprise software. There are a handful of banks, but they have all the money. The specialized features they care about speak very loudly at feature prioritization meetings.
• bryanmgreen 7y ago
  As someone who is building a B2B SAAS company and made the decision to not focus on large-enterprise, I think you're both right. At the end of the day, it's just plain hard to create a clean effective product that can be used by 5,000+ person organizations. Regardless of use-case, boatloads of data will be collected in large-enterprise software and it has to be transferred and presented to many end-users in a clear way. And very rarely will it be one exclusive universal data-type. Usually it will contain varying types of information that will be needed by multiple teams and maybe across several different office locations. And that's just the product issues, let's not talk about sales or compliance. It's just plain hard.
  • ridaj 7y ago
    This gets closer to the underlying truth. Even if you had smart procurement people who understood the benefits of great UX, another issue would be that enterprise problems are typically sub-scale compared with today's consumer products. There is one or two orders of magnitude more complexity and one or two orders of magnitude less users than in the consumer space, or even less for niche industry needs. Even if you make it up with additional willingness to pay per user, the market isn't always there for spending a lot to design, develop and iterate on the perfect UX.
  • wayoutthere 7y ago
    I think a lot of SaaS companies end up failing fast when they focus on the enterprise. The sales cycle is longer, and having a massive client can end up putting their individual needs over features that would make the product more attractive to the market as a whole. SaaS makes the most money when users can self-service in large numbers at relatively low transaction costs, which typically means SMB should be your first market. The enterprise channel is where you go only once you have a mature product and a healthy revenue base to do the enterprise payola scheme with consulting companies.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      When you go over after whales, they can fund your business without having to go after VC funding and you can milk them to go after smaller clients.
• asjw 7y ago
  No serious enterprise uses gsuite , it's a small businesses tool. iPhones and smartphones in general have greatly increased the risk of data theft or being spied. Insurance companies are more than happy that others have switched to smartphones (I worked in insurance consulting for cyber risks)
  • Macha 7y ago
    Does 200k headcount count as enterprise?
  • chasd00 7y ago
    iirc Salesforce uses gsuite internally
  • yearofthespider 7y ago
    BBVA is a bank with 140,000 employees, and they use G Suite. Office 365 and G Suite aren't small business tools anymore.
  • captrb 7y ago
    https://gsuite.google.com/customers/ https://gsuite.google.com/customers/ I don't think your comment is accurate, based on my first-hand knowledge of large companies that use gsuite, as well as their customer list in the above link.
  • edubs25 7y ago
    define small? My partner worked here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LafargeHolcim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LafargeHolcim They used gsuite for email, o365 for other aspects. Required iPhones if you wanted a device - wouldnt allow android at the time... but that may have changed since
• Macha 7y ago
  The compelling feature of gsuite for my employer was apparently the ability to turn off IMAP etc and therefore rule out emails being kept locally/beyond the retention period for better access control/cheaper legal compliance, not anything UX related.
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    That's... Kind of hilarious. I'm assuming your employer has never heard of printers or copy-paste. ;)
    • Qwertystop 7y ago
      Or forwarding, or clicking "archive" instead of "delete", or screenshots...
    • chongli 7y ago
      I don’t think it’s fair to jump to the conclusion that management at the GP’s see their employees as malicious. It’s far more plausible that they just don’t want emails automatically downloaded and stored on everyone’s computers. Many companies have strict regulations on data retention and they’re regularly audited to ensure compliance. By keeping the data off employee computers, compliance is simplified.
    • abraae 7y ago
      You're thinking about this very much from a techy point of view. We have a similar value prop with our platform (we store PII including actual identity documents). It's not about making it impossible for users to download and store sensitive data. Everyone knows that that's impossible - yet somehow Snapchat and its disappearing messages is still a thing. Instead, it is intended to be coupled with policies. As long as the company has a policy against downloading/storing confidential information, then the company is covered. Then, when a case of e.g identity theft happens through a rogue employee, the company can demonstrate that it has taken all reasonable steps to avoid it. That is a much better position than showing up in court and saying "yeah, we didn't try to prevent people from downloading PII, that's impossible anyway".
• lmm 7y ago
  > But the average business does not really have such needs, or at least it can be a mistake to blindly trade off employee happiness and productivity against feature checklists, yet that is typically the approach employed by procurement experts. I think there's a different dynamic at play: the individual is making purchasing decisions based not on what they think the business needs but on what they personally want. E.g. JIRA has a huge number of micromanagement features that I doubt procurement departments are looking for; rather they appeal to managers in companies where they're the ones making purchasing decisions.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Related, my co-worker and I have evaluated a dozen different tools big and small, including Jira and that Jetbrains thing. And we still can't find a system that would meet our needs, which I think are simple: - Model tasks as DAGs, not as lists. I.e. I want to work with a dependency graph (JetBrains thing sort of can do that with task relationships, but the UI isn't oriented towards exploiting it). - If that's too much to ask, at least allow to nest arbitrary amount of subtasks, and not just one (like Jira and almost everyone else). - Fast. - Proper keyboard shortcuts (again, JetBrains is good at it, but it's missing some crucial shortcuts and UI concepts, like "add a subtask to current task" and "go back to parent task"). - Allow estimating how long the task will take, without having to specify when it'll start. - Render a proper GAANT chart and do a critical path analysis. I really think I'm not asking for much, and yet nothing I've seen can do it. Most Jira-like systems try hard to be "agile", which means sacrificing features and utility to chase misguided ideological purity (like the whole "no subtask" thing). Seriously, if Emacs had a first-class support for real-time collaboration, Org Mode would be vastly better than all task management offerings on the market.
    • xyst 7y ago
      What's the point of nested subtasks? I hate creating subtasks as it is, but now I have to create this nasty tree of sub-subtasks? Almost seems like "micro-tasks" at this point.
      • 7y ago
• alfalfasprout 7y ago
  This, in my experience, is what seems like the most likely culprit. A CTO/CIO gets impressed by a fancy feature list when really, what would be the best fit is something simple, stable, and easy to use. We have more and more examples nowadays of ease of use beating out giant monoliths and it's only likely to continue except in a few fringe use cases.
• cwyers 7y ago
  The iPhone, via the App Store, and Slack, via the extension marketplace and APIs, are _incredibly_ configurable. Mindboggling so. (And many companies are using MDM along with the iPhone, so it's not like they don't think they need control there.)
• Scoundreller 7y ago
  > There absolutely are outlier businesses like banking, government, healthcare and other highly regulated fields where they do have critical control needs. Control needs, yes, but there’s still a massive amount of trust required. If the software could always prevent you from doing the « wrong » thing, then that task would be automated. Logging every action isn’t the complicated part. But the bit about workflows is 100% true. No two hospital systems are the same. You can’t buy your Diagnostic Imaging equipment from the same vendor as your registration system, each with their own workflow. You could probably fingerprint every hospital system based on which different clinical vendors they’ve adopted for their various functions.
• moonbug 7y ago
  the prospect of running an enterprise on gsuite is..amusing.
• tw04 7y ago
  >No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. The iPhone took almost a decade to get to the appropriate functionality. The part you're leaving out is most executives just ended up carrying two devices and whined to IT about "why can't YOU make my iphone as good at email as my blackberry???" >Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user Except I can count on one hand the number of fortune 500 enterprises that moved to gsuite over o365. >Slack is another proof point - the "consumerization of IT" trend in general. I'm not even sure how this is relevant. Companies that were using skype for business or cisco jabber likely still have skype/jabber running alongside Slack. This reads like someone who lives in the valley and thinks the valley is in any way reflective of corporate America. Hint: It's not.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    I mostly agree although I also think a lot of businesses think they are a lot snowflake-ier than they actually are. But in my experience, smaller businesses can actually be worse offenders in this regard. Large enterprises actually do have a lot of complex needs and even relatively small changes affect a lot of people. But I've had someone at a very small company argue with me that they needed their own Exchange server because Gmail (at the time) didn't have some features like sub-labels/folders that they were used to.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    The iPhone took almost a decade to get to the appropriate functionality. The part you're leaving out is most executives just ended up carrying two devices and whined to IT about "why can't YOU make my iphone as good at email as my blackberry???" That’s not true. The iPhone became good enough to replace the BlackBerry around 4 or 5 years in. By 2011, the BlackBerry was losing market share as Apple added enterprise features.
    • gertrunde 7y ago
      And yet neither Android nor iPhone today as as good at doing email as Blackberry was 10 years ago. They do lots of other things a lot better, but email? Nope.
• mschuster91 7y ago
  Office 365 isn't even gdpr compliant.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You're confusing "checklist-driven development" with developing needed features. I'm guessing because you assume that the features actually work. The problem of enterprise software is less that the features are unnecessary, and more that they work only on paper, but not in the real world. Since the software is sold to people who aren't using it, they can't evaluate the actual implementation and usability - so what gets sold is garbage that meets criteria. Now what I see you arguing for is not "consumerization of IT", but infantilization of IT. Modern UX is oriented about dumbing down software, removing necessary features because they're "unused"[0], and about a myth that you can eliminate training time. Which is why people - again, not the users - buy into it. The sales strategy is: put it in the cloud, ask for subscription while screaming "it's OPEX and not CAPEX", and remove any and all features so everything looks slick on the demo, and the problem only becomes apparent when somebody tries to actually do something with it. And then actual users have to suffer. For as much as software is eating the world, I wonder how much actual, hard productivity does the modern software of the web cost, compared to the software it displaced. -- [0] - The way "data-driven" approach would tell you that there's no point adding airbags to cars, since almost nobody uses them ever.
• AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > But the average business does not really have such needs Well the average business is by definition not an enterprise. Enterprises need things like a solid AD integration, self hosting, enough monitoring coverage to put things like DLP and anti virus controls in place (yeah I know anti virus sucks, but work in a company with 10,000+ people, and you’ll see it getting genuine hits every day). The fact is a lot of the modern software with good UX that we all love doesn’t meet these basic requirements, or at least doesn’t meet them as well as the old enterprise stuff does. Many “enterprises” are their own worst enemy in terms of UX, by simply not valuing it enough. But I’ve worked in some that have made incredibly well organized, well resourced, and well supported attempts to modernize their technology stacks, and the truth is that the best and most innovative software that’s produced today, often (and perhaps rightly) doesn’t have the basic needs of enterprise in mind. So even with the best intentions, you often end up stuck using apps with poor UX. As a side note, you can do absolutely fantastic DevOps in enterprise these days (even if you’re on a VMware stack). But a lot of the user facing stuff still sucks. Especially IM, which is why I have little hope that the enterprise love of email will die anytime soon.
• x0x0 7y ago
  I posit the BYO device went forward because enterprises realized they could make people pay for their own equipment.
• mbesto 7y ago
  > No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer features that is making inroads in the market and generally works better for users. Slack is another proof point - the "consumerization of IT" trend in general. O365 far exceed Gsuites market share and is generally better for users because most companies users still use the Outlook desktop client. MS Teams exceeds Slacks market share. Team instant communication is a minor blip in the overall market for Enterprise software. > Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX. Having configuration that adopts to compliance and regulation is UX. The U in the UX is just not the end user but the admin user. Consumerization of IT is absolutely a thing, but not for this is for productivity apps, not enterprise grade apps - you're conflating the two. To pretend like all of the features demanded by enterprise middle and upper management is irrelevant and unthoughtful, as another comment said, is just "typical SV think". UX to the end user is certainly becoming much more relevant in the enterprise space, it's not as black and white as you think. (note - i'm a former SAP employee and I've certainly seen my fair share of shit)
  • ridaj 7y ago
    I think you and I are saying the same thing. I'm not saying Slack makes Msft irrelevant. Just that Slack makes better UX which is why they're managing to make sales outside of IT traditional channels - because once users have the power to do it, they choose something else than what IT gives them. Same with iPhone. It got so bad that in many companies, people started using them in breach of corporate preference for official systems. Just today I met with someone who carries two laptops for work: one that is enterprise-IT sanctioned to access internal resources and is super restricted; the other one to do actual work. How does he work with two laptops? SDcards. In 2019. The fact that all the craptastic enterprise UX is holding on so well in terms of the $ amount indeed is the observation: enterprise services for the most part do suck. I don't think, and I didn't say, that it's always a winning commercial strategy to focus on UX when it comes to enterprise. Based on available evidence, I too would conclude that focusing on giving middle managers a power trip of control options looks like the better strategy, UX be damned.
• hinkley 7y ago
  There’s supposedly an axiom for salesforce that it’s easier to be successful with salesforce if you adapt your business practices to match salesforce instead of the other way around.
  • com 7y ago
    Same with SAP.