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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

>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?

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.

But reading what I wrote, I see why you asked. Yes, sometimes there is a thing that is bad for the user and simultaneously perceived to be good for the person paying, like a lot of the ceremony you have to do to get anything to happen in JIRA.

But sometimes it is a question of different priorities, and I did not mention that above. Good catch.

The people experiencing dropped calls aren't the people who made the purchasing decision. The people experiencing poor performance don't have a say in the matter and are required to use the tool, and the people who made the purchasing decision are getting what they want out of the deal.

In case of my company (a 40k employees multinational), everybody gets to suffer from Skype for Business' ridiculousness, I'm guessing even the people who bought it (heck, I'm guessing even the CEO is cursing it on a regular basis). Still, we use it.

Skype for business is not even 'skype'. Actually, it's "lync" branded as skype. Overall it's an awful product with hilarious built-in html render that ends in CPU saturation during group chat and a bit of html content. It takes like a minute to close itself if there are 20-30 chats.

Even the executable is still named lync

Right. As a Linux user I skipped most of Skype for Business experience. It cannot even do passive screen sharing (i. e. display what others share). A web client that cannot show all contents... And that for a paid service, every free aka customer is the product service works in Linux browsers.

The old normal (not for business) Skype Linux client could even do active screen sharing (share your own screen) on Linux. Although it was limited to 1:1 calls IIRC. Haven't checked whether they have managed to break/remove that in the new Linux client...

And this is proof that Microsoft is still a monopoly, because they can still force people to use software they don't want. Microsoft's biggest accomplishment in technology in the last 20 years is to teach everyone that software is horrible and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Windows, macOS and iOS quality usability and discoverability have dropped year on year, Linux usability has stayed abhorrent, every major website I use that has done a big redesign has made it worse for me with more focus on whitespace, style, hiding UI elements, and adverts than substance and usability. Google search experience has gone seriously downhill, Amazon's marketplace and search has increasing quality problems, Facebook's redesigns are much hated, Reddit's redesign has hidden UI features and turned it into a bloated whitespace-obsessed ad-heavy image-centric style. Chrome, Firefox, the hiding of useful UI elements, the increasing resource demands.

Software is horrible.

Software that looked like Excel 2000 with visible accelerators was clean, easy to use, discoverable, fast, not very aesthetically pleasing but at least consistent. macOS of 5+ years ago was more human-friendly.

>Linux usability has stayed abhorrent

Linux usability is only abhorrent if you use Gnome (3). It's fine with KDE, Xfce, and others. I started using Xfce recently at work and it's great: usability is just what I expect (i.e. it doesn't do any weird UI experiments like Gnome3, Windows, etc.), it's stable and reliable, and discoverable since it was designed back when they thought discoverability was a good thing. KDE5 is pretty good too.

Stop using UIs that have been taken over by people trying to "revolutionize" UIs and you won't have the problems you're seeing. Linux has plenty of such UIs, but for some odd reason they're not the default setting of the mainstream distros.

I think it's because if you start using Linux, you want to feel like you're using something new and high-tech. So the super-chrome UIs tend to win out.

I like my setup (i3wm), but it would be a horrible default. You have to read a manual to make it usable. Gnome is a kind of nice default - since everything looks modern and works out of the box.

I'm not even talking of GUIs, I'm talking of exchanges like this:

root@server:~# ip route add 192.168.1.0/30 10.0.0.1

Error: either "to" is duplicate, or "10.0.0.1" is a garbage.

The "help" is literally a dump of the grammar, which doesn't contain enough detail to add a route (the syntax of PREFIX is not described). The error message is bafflingly useless. Of all the options available relating to routing, the two I use most are "route a network via a gateway IP" and "remove a route" and I'm going to guess that those are the two most common operations for most people not doing any advanced networking.

Note that this is the replacement to the old "route" command, which had a single line of help: "inet_route [-vF] add {-host|-net} Target[/prefix] [gw Gw]" which is way way more helpful for this use case!

Of course it's possible to go into `man ip` and then find routing help is elsewere and go into `man ip-route` and at the bottom of a 400 line document there is /a single example/ of adding a default route which doesn't include a subnet definition, and then to decode that the error message about duplicate/garbage means "you didn't add the word "via"" and then to backtrack into the grammar dump and trace where that was mentioned.

And of course this is but one tool.

And of course it's better for many use cases that it be stable and performant than that it be frilly.

But all over, it feels like this. Usability, quality error messages, making the common things easy and discoverable, are all afterthoughts with priorities somewhere between "caveat user" and "it's free so shut up" and "we refuse to change it because ~POSIX~" and "usability is for wimps, Linux is for clever people (where clever means 'able to edit a text file and willing to do everything the hard way')" and "we benefit from people buying RedHat Certifications so why should we make it any easier than we have to?".

I'm not saying it's incapable or unstable or useless, but I am saying usability for common tools and overall experience is really, really, really, really poor. With possible exception "install Ubuntu/Mint/flavour-of-day and run FireFox to get to your Googles".

They're not a monopoly, and they're not forcing anyone to use software they don't want. There's a bunch of different options if you don't like Skype. I've used GoToMeeting in the recent past, and it worked fine. The problem is that people are just too stupid to look for alternatives to Microsoft products, and would rather complain than do something about it.

Oh, my, the customers got stupider. They could use the old skye just fine, but then the IQ sank - and its been rock bottom ever since.

Completely impplaussible that maybe those stupid people do not use the alternatives, because they suck even more? As in, they are non standardized, not easy to setup et etc.

>They could use the old skye just fine

The old Skype was great. But it's gone now; that's how the world works: things change, and not always for the better. You have to adapt.

>Completely impplaussible that maybe those stupid people do not use the alternatives, because they suck even more?

Given all the complaints I've seen about new-Skype? No. It's because people are just too stupid to look for alternatives when the thing they've been using turns to crap.

>As in, they are non standardized, not easy to setup et etc.

The newer alternatives are web-based and easy (or, at least, no more difficult than new-Skype). And WTF does "standardized" mean? There's no standardization for video chat programs; that makes as much sense as asking about standardization for social media websites like Facebook.

> 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.

Yes, and depending on the enterprise, these "big features only there to justify high costs" may not actually be needed or useful or relevant. It might be 'OK' to have a bunch of interns slap something together, if it only needs to be "real" enough to look pretty and look functional in a few demos or in a few specific happy-day cases.

Analytics and Reporting is probably the most common example I've seen of this -- it's not a bad feature on it's own, but companies will sometimes pay top dollar for it, even in places it makes no sense and/or will never get used. If that gets delivered in a broken/unusable state, it's "ok" because the customer will never actually click that button anyway.

----

If "New Skype" is "enterprise communication support" in a corporate feature list (and not a real product filling a real need, as it used to be) then I can see how a broken or unusable Skype could still be a 'success' for Microsoft.

Note: I don't agree with any or support any of this. But I've seen this play out in real life enough to know it happens.

This cuts both ways. We frequently get requirements in an RFP that we've got to put resources into supporting, but when everything gets put into place, the customer never uses the feature that they demanded. They wasted the cost of our investment into their demands.

How does one play golf apocryphally?

Playing without the intention of treating it as a sport, but as an excuse to drink outdoors.

Somehow... that doesn't sound quite right.

I think they meant "apothecarily". As in, I play golf to self medicate.

Hilarious, I want to snarf that!

But actually, I meant that it is apocryphal that salespeople have to play golf to close Enterprise Sales. It's more of a stand-in catch-all term for semi-formal socializing with the client.

Right but it's not really apocryphal because apocryphal doesn't connote or denote stereotypical, proverbial, cliche, conventional wisdom, caricature, etc. Salespeople playing golf with customers to close enterprise sales is not some uncertain thing that has reached us through dubious sources.

It isn't? I certainly doubt whether it's true (not being in enterprise sales myself and not being important enough to end up on the other side of those sales) enough to make a cliche (I don't doubt somewhere somebody invited a client to golf to make a sale - but how common is it?) and haven't seen any reliable sources on the prevalence of it.

It's a big fat cliche. For instance, here's how Tony Rodoni (Executive Vice President for the Commercial Business Unit at Salesforce.com) starts a blog post of some sort:

"When I started in sales, my boss told me, "Your job is to get to know your customer and build a relationship. Nothing is more important than building a relationship.” The second most important thing was to make sure that the customer always won when we played golf."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2017/01/03/the-death...

I have been trying to find that Spolsky article, please link it up if you can

"Ask Joel," February, 2004, fourth item:

https://discuss.fogcreek.com/askjoel/default.asp?cmd=show&ix...

"With software sold in corporations, as soon as your price gets up in the $3000 level, the amount of approval it needs is so absurd that you are not going to sell products without a salesperson making a few visits. Hiring the salesperson, sending them out to make presentations, hotels, airfare -- now it costs $50,000 to get the sale done just in sales closing costs. That's why you see a lot of software products at $100,000 and a lot under $3000, but anywhere in-between and it's impossible to make sales. (It's sort of funny -- these big corporations create so much bureaucracy around purchasing in order to protect themselves against losing money, but they just force the vendors to spend a fortune on salesforces, which results in vastly higher prices for the big corporations)."

That sounds plausible but does not explain why UI became so progressively horrible lately. I get that they may be developing corporate features I can't see, but why did they spend time on developing series of new UIs, each of them slower and crappier than the previous one?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wifi and continental breakfast. At cheaper hotels, both will often be free.

In an interesting twist, while a free continental breakfast will often be significantly lower quality than a paid higher-end breakfast, I've found that the free wifi is almost always significantly better than the paid wifi.

In fact, many business hotels have tiered wifi plans. And they all suck, even their most expensive plans will be worse than the Motel 8 down the street.

Ok, but I'm still wondering which hotels are these corporate-friendly anti-consumer hotels. I haven't seen any hotels with non-free Wifi, and I've stayed at quite a few different big ones.

As for continental breakfast, sure it's not as good as some really good sit-down breakfast restaurant, but it's free and more importantly it's fast: you just go down to the lobby and either eat it there or grab some stuff and take it back to your room to munch on before you leave for the day. It's a big time-saver. Going to a separate restaurant and waiting for food to be made for you and delivered and then waiting and waiting and waiting for the waiter to bring you the check takes a lot of time.

Do you not live in the US?

Mariott-branded Mariott, such as the Courtyard. DoubleTree by Hilton. Generically, airport hotels.

Stayed at a Courtyard on HongKong just two weeks ago. Wifi was free.

Any hotel nicer than your average Sheraton (Weston, W Hotels, etc.) will not have free Wi-Fi. Sheratons might not even have free Wi-Fi. Where you have been staying seem like they'd be classified as "motels" (like a Best Western Express or whatever) not actual "hotels".

I tend to stay in the nicer class of hotels, and I can't remember the last time I paid for WiFi (though there often is a paid tier available with ostensibly better throughput, and sometimes there are restrictions on # of devices or such).

I think what you say is possibly true, but like other posters here I do not recall paying for wifi in recent years and I also stay at many different hotels. I have seen services where you can pay for better throughput or for a public IP. I wonder if perhaps I and the other posters are not being charged for wifi due to "status". That is, we have been flagged by the hotel chains as valuable customers and free wifi is a perk of that status. E.e. "platinum" status or similar.

Prove it.

I've been staying at places like Holiday Inn, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Country Inn & Suites, Courtyard, etc., which area all most certainly "hotels" and all of them have free Wifi.

At the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, where I've stayed in the past, wifi wasn't free. I've heard that's changed but I haven't checked the website to confirm. Rooms are roughly 300USD/night.

I too have never stayed anywhere without free WiFi, and I travel for my work, thus I'm staying at corporate-approved hotels, for maybe 30-40 nights per year in various cities and hotel chains. And these aren't fancy hotels either, much cheaper than places I'd stay if I was on holiday enjoying myself.

The closest I've seen was a budget hotel where I stayed (not for work) after a huge party. The WiFi at that hotel was free, but it was heavily rate-limited and the rate-limits were lifted for a fee. You could use basic web pages, but Youtube wasn't possible without paying.

You said it yourself "these aren't fancy hotels" - that's the point. The better and fancier the hotel, the more you pay for the room, the less likely you are to get free wifi.

I've stayed in some nice hotels in the U.S. and in a wide variety of hotels internationally. The best "nice U.S. hotel wifi" would often rank around the average 3rd world "acceptable" hotel.

Backpacker hostels also generally have great free wifi.

Agree - 5 star hotels have the worst. Clunky, shitty, login procedures and laugh out loud ridiculous pricing models.

This is similar to the situation for tourist visas in various countries. The shittiest countries that you absolutely would never want to overstay in have the most difficult to obtain visas. I once got a visa to go to bangladesh - it was expensive, took 2 months to get, and I still had to bribe 2 different people when I got to dhaka airport to get through.

Also one of the reasons business laptops could get away with awful displays for such a long time.

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.

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.

> 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.

The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.

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.

Add random crashes, windows not refreshing until you restart the app, app being slow as hell in general or my personal favorite - the "feature" that if you unmute your microphone within first couple seconds of joining the call, you're dropped from it (it's 100% repeatable across the whole company I work in).

> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though.

I beg to differ on this.. we use Skype for business and have heard nothing but complaints.

One personal beef I have with it is IM messages don't sync between devices. I start a chat with someone on my workstation then when I leave my desk and try to see it on my phone it's unavailable. Or same issue when switching between an RDP and local session.

If you enabled it (it is by default I believe), the conversations are stored in Outlook.

It sucks... but you can still get to them if you have access to Outlook.

When you say "you" here, do you mean "you" or the BOFH somewhere who controls the Exchange server? I stopped opening Lync at work because, among other issues, it wouldn't save conversations and I couldn't figure out how to make it do so.

Most versions of Lync/Skype for Business allow you to keep conversation history locally in Outlook. It's under Skype for Business> tools> options> Personal> check whether you have ticked “save IM conversations in my email Conversation History folder”. It can be disabled by the SfB admins though.

Newer versions do support server side logging to your Outlook mailbox too but it must be configured by the SfB and Exchange admins.

Doesn't work ~50% of the time though.

I've not once had a problem with Skype for Business and I've been using it since it was released

SfB was really bad upon initial release but it's gotten pretty good. No complaints.

I must be using a different skype for business then, ours can't even handle copy and paste from the chat window. It will regularly lose messages or send them to the wrong group. Sometimes you'll get a new message notification but the actual message will arrive several second later. It takes several seconds to close the chat window if there are a few conversations open.

And that's just the issues we have trying to send text, don't get me started on the video and audio.

I am completely unable to view my message history. And worse I have a missed message notification that refuses to go away. Somewhere along the line I missed a message but there's nothing there to see....

What a piece of garbage.

Oh and whoever decided that Win+F4 is an appropriate shortcut key for Mute Microphone can go fly a freaking kite.

Seriously. On what planet is this ever acceptable. It seems like a sophomore joke.

Totally disagree. I work with HPE (went to Skype around 18 mo ago?) and other large OEMs/software publishers, and collaborating from OUTSIDE the four walls of the Skype-implementing organization has gotten atrocious. Imagine driving on 101 and need to join a call...but you realize it's Skype, so there's not a one-click call-in...you hope that the app will open but first the url opens a webpage...then you authorize opening in the app called "Business", then you try to spell your name...ugh

Also, when clicking on their "web client", you immediately get a cab file (windows installer file) download request. I'm on Linux. What am I supposed to do with that file?

It's like the SfB team still lives in the "everybody uses Windows" mindset of the 90's.

The only alternative on Linux is tel.red, which works, but only for an incredibly loose definition of the word "work". I've never used a buggier piece of software.

oes Zoom support linux?

Skype for business is shit. It filters content. I cannot paste an error to a colleague, because it's "too large". If I first write a meaningless "Hi" instead, I can paste the text just fine.

Settings revert a lot.

It's damn slow for remote sessions. Barely usable, really. File transfers don't work most of the time (and are slow).

Phone service? Call quality is really really bad.

The mobile app (Android at least) eats battery like candy, fails to send messages and is crashing a lot.

Lync/Skype for Business is a daily pain to suffer here.

I've tried Skype for Business and found it lacking. Skype for Business (now years into availability) doesn't handle screen control across the only two OSes it purports to "support" (MacOS and Windows). I think interactive drawing is also not supported everywhere.

From what I'm told, the Skype for Business back-end is not enterprise-ready, by which I mean the back-end is written to assume that one user or one set of users has admin control over all the lines set up in the system. So one user or set of users remains in charge of all of the telephony details (role-based accounts, response groups, etc.). A proper enterprise-ready program allows the admin capabilities to be limited to groups of users and delegate functionality to those groups for certain lines. This arrangement lets you have multiple simultaneous admins edit different non-conflicting details (such as setup for two different response groups) simultaneously with no problems. This means large organizations with lots of somewhat independent groups have to set up work queues where someone in each group files a request for the Skype for Business admin(s) to work on requests (e.g. Please make 123-555-1234 a response group set up in the following way...). This slows down an admin in any of those groups considerably as those admins wait for their work requests to be fulfilled or further questions to be sent back in response.

Also some of the limits in Skype for Business strike me as silly: one of them concerns response groups (a Skype for Business term for how inbound calls are routed to a series of receptionists called "agents" in Skype for Business parlance). If you want a response group where some of the agents are allowed to decide whether they want to receive the calls (known as a "formal login" response group in Skype for Business parlance), and other users are required to receive the calls (an "informal login") you can't have both of these kinds of agents in the same response group. You have to set it up so that, say, the informal login agents get the call first and (if they don't take the call after a few seconds) the call is passed to the formal login agents.

From what I'm told, Skype for Business doesn't handle nested directory service groups properly when those groups contain sets of agents (which I understand Skype for Business treats as distribution lists when one uses Microsoft's directory server Active Directory). If that's so, this means that organizations that keep tidy directory service hierarchies can't reuse their groups efficiently.

> 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.

The company I was working for had Skype for Business, and the video calls were such a disaster that people would secretly use Hangouts for every meeting that didn't have higher-ups participating.

>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.

no problem, CC-BY-SA.

Did you just license your phrase?

You can also buy an enterprise license. Just contact our very competent sales team for a quote and NDA.

...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".

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.

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.

You want people to note the differences from the version you wrote?

Can't you creeps ever just let a joke slide?

Sounds good enough. Bonus points, it will prevent anyone with a significant legal team from using it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll have to take your word for it that it's gotten better. I try to minimize my exposure to Office as much as possible.

I used to think Excel was the one exception to Office being awful until I was assigned a project creating an app in Excel using VBA and found out how incredibly fragile Excel is. This was about 6 years ago.

However, I don't think anyone thinks Office is bad because it has stuff they don't use, but that the stuff they do use either doesn't work well (e.g., Outlook) or it's too hard to use (e.g., Word).

> project creating an app in Excel using VBA

Oh yeah, this is generally where I'd say things start to fall over. A development platform, it ain't. Generally my advice around VBA is that if you're at the stage you need anything but the simplest VBA, you probably want something else (Access for DB style work or Python/R for data munging).

Outlook has got much better - most of the previous issues around lockups and poor performance have improved if not gone away entirely. Can't speak for Exchange.

Well, you can make up a definition yourself if you want, doesn't change the actual meaning though.

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

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