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Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make everything super extensible, but it co

Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make everything super extensible, but it comes at a a cost and that cost is usually performance.

jonplackett 5y ago
Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.
- mrwnmonm 5y ago
  Which ERP isn't?
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Maybe none? I think Netsuite is particularly slow though. Luckily I only have to use it for timesheets but even for that it should have its own job number for the time wasted waiting for it to load.
rsj_hn 5y ago
Yup, the "enterprise" software space is generally incredibly expensive and buggy and a poor user experience, and there is nothing anyone has ever been able to do about it, as firms want custom code just for them, and so the development/maintenance cost can't be leveraged over millions of customers all getting the same software like the B2C space. So given that the market is 3 orders of magnitude smaller, you have a choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some other combination of this. That leaves you with a few options: 1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support. 2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor user experience" territory but at least it works and is cheaper than option 3 3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch for each business. That's the old IBM Services model. So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM Services, then it's a godsend.
- rvanmil 5y ago
  Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just that.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    All companies in this space start out fast and user friendly, but to gain additional customers in this space they need to add more features. See my first item. Then they either fail or end up an uber-platform. Again, this has nothing to do with your company, it is just the nature of the market, and it's funny when someone gets an idea to start a "lean", "fast" product as if no one else had thought of that before. Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but they faced a market challenge and made some choices with trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't know software should be fast", then you are not going to end up any better than they are once you reach their scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always made the right choices. But an understanding of where they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need to be understood before you are in a position to improve on what the incumbents are doing.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      You forgot the other part, to make business in the enterprise it matters more to talk to the right people than what the software actually does, and the large majority of such companies see anything IT related as cost center.
    - 5y ago
tootie 5y ago
Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I am going through this right now in a project. A lot of configurations break the database model and can't be really modeled by the database so you end up doing a lot in code which is way slower. Seems we need a type of database that can support these super-flexible customizable data models better. Maybe something where the data model and stored procedures written in a language like C#, Java or JS are understood by the database and optimized.

jonplackett 5y ago

Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.

mrwnmonm 5y ago
Which ERP isn't?
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Maybe none? I think Netsuite is particularly slow though. Luckily I only have to use it for timesheets but even for that it should have its own job number for the time wasted waiting for it to load.

rsj_hn 5y ago

Yup, the "enterprise" software space is generally incredibly expensive and buggy and a poor user experience, and there is nothing anyone has ever been able to do about it, as firms want custom code just for them, and so the development/maintenance cost can't be leveraged over millions of customers all getting the same software like the B2C space. So given that the market is 3 orders of magnitude smaller, you have a choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some other combination of this. That leaves you with a few options: 1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support. 2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor user experience" territory but at least it works and is cheaper than option 3 3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch for each business. That's the old IBM Services model. So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM Services, then it's a godsend.

rvanmil 5y ago
Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for is pretty successful at doing just that.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  All companies in this space start out fast and user friendly, but to gain additional customers in this space they need to add more features. See my first item. Then they either fail or end up an uber-platform. Again, this has nothing to do with your company, it is just the nature of the market, and it's funny when someone gets an idea to start a "lean", "fast" product as if no one else had thought of that before. Really if you think you can do better than X, whether X is oracle forms or SAP or whatnot, it's important to understand where X went wrong. Hint: it's very rarely because they were "old-fashioned" or didn't realize that customers liked fast software that was easy to use. The founders of X were just as smart/capable as you are, but they faced a market challenge and made some choices with trade offs. If you limit your analysis to "they didn't know software should be fast", then you are not going to end up any better than they are once you reach their scale. I am not trying to say that every incumbent always made the right choices. But an understanding of where they went wrong needs to go beyond "they went wrong because they are old fashioned" or "they went wrong because they didn't realize software shouldn't be filled with bugs". There are real hard problems here that need to be understood before you are in a position to improve on what the incumbents are doing.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    You forgot the other part, to make business in the enterprise it matters more to talk to the right people than what the software actually does, and the large majority of such companies see anything IT related as cost center.
  - 5y ago

tootie 5y ago

Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I am going through this right now in a project. A lot of configurations break the database model and can't be really modeled by the database so you end up doing a lot in code which is way slower. Seems we need a type of database that can support these super-flexible customizable data models better. Maybe something where the data model and stored procedures written in a language like C#, Java or JS are understood by the database and optimized.