3 ms·

> many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated And yet, no one has produced something better. Everyone complai

> many users of their terrible program, reputed to be among the worst programs ever perpetrated And yet, no one has produced something better. Everyone complains Concur is dogshit but no one has presented a worthy competitor. Where is the "SAP killer" startup? I'm sure someone will publish one to GitHub any day now. Just like Threads, the "Twitter killer", dead on arrival.

zamadatix 3y ago
Pretty much every expense system I've ever used was better than Concur. When the business is using SAP for everything else it doesn't really matter what minor stuff like that is best of breed though.
- SmellTheGlove 3y ago
  I work with internal systems for a living. As an end user, you’re not the primary customer - finance is. Concur is by no stretch amazing, but it works fairly well on the back end where your expenses come in, route for approval, get paid, get accounted for, etc. I’m not trying to be dismissive. I absolutely try for the best internal user experience across the board, and it’s led me to try a lot of the shinier startup T&E systems. But Concur works well for finance and accounting, and frankly, it’s also cheap - something you also have to factor in G&A tooling. Those two factors together have overcome my desire to rip it out at a couple of different employers. And given the price sensitivity for a tool that does not generate revenue for its customers, it remains a tough space for new entrants to disrupt. It’s not enough to make it good, you also gotta make it cheap. When I’m done with the startup carousel, I might try my hand at this - but you should bet against me!
acomjean 3y ago
I made a SAP killer in lotus Notes. Ok maybe not exactly, but at IBM the choice was to wait for SAP to come in and do the project management with that, or have me (intern) port existing non Y2K compliant green screen project management program to Lotus Notes. It wouldn’t be as feature rich as SAP but it would do what was needed. Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier. Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.
- nradov 3y ago
  A huge number of companies developed custom internal Lotus Notes (IBM Domino) applications. It just wasn't widely publicized. Notes was great for quick and dirty workflow applications. You could literally build and deploy some simple functionality in minutes. But it also made certain more advanced features effectively impossible to build at all; it just wasn't a general purpose platform. And the fact that source code was locked up inside binary files created huge obstacles to working in larger teams.

zamadatix 3y ago

Pretty much every expense system I've ever used was better than Concur. When the business is using SAP for everything else it doesn't really matter what minor stuff like that is best of breed though.

SmellTheGlove 3y ago
I work with internal systems for a living. As an end user, you’re not the primary customer - finance is. Concur is by no stretch amazing, but it works fairly well on the back end where your expenses come in, route for approval, get paid, get accounted for, etc. I’m not trying to be dismissive. I absolutely try for the best internal user experience across the board, and it’s led me to try a lot of the shinier startup T&E systems. But Concur works well for finance and accounting, and frankly, it’s also cheap - something you also have to factor in G&A tooling. Those two factors together have overcome my desire to rip it out at a couple of different employers. And given the price sensitivity for a tool that does not generate revenue for its customers, it remains a tough space for new entrants to disrupt. It’s not enough to make it good, you also gotta make it cheap. When I’m done with the startup carousel, I might try my hand at this - but you should bet against me!

acomjean 3y ago

I made a SAP killer in lotus Notes. Ok maybe not exactly, but at IBM the choice was to wait for SAP to come in and do the project management with that, or have me (intern) port existing non Y2K compliant green screen project management program to Lotus Notes. It wouldn’t be as feature rich as SAP but it would do what was needed. Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier. Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.

nradov 3y ago
A huge number of companies developed custom internal Lotus Notes (IBM Domino) applications. It just wasn't widely publicized. Notes was great for quick and dirty workflow applications. You could literally build and deploy some simple functionality in minutes. But it also made certain more advanced features effectively impossible to build at all; it just wasn't a general purpose platform. And the fact that source code was locked up inside binary files created huge obstacles to working in larger teams.