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Comment by ridaj | Hacker News Reader

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.

There absolutely are outlier businesses like banking, government, healthcare and other highly regulated fields where they do have critical control needs. Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX.

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.

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>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.

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.

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.

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.

In what ways?

What did blackberry do so well in email?

I, for example, enjoyed the wheel. Scroll wheel to email you want to read, press wheel to open, scroll to read. To be honest I don't remember how I close email, click wheel again or another button, but the whole experience can be done with one hand/thumb easily, while holding coffee in another hand. Try that with iPhone.

Keyboard. Touch sucks for writing.

I’ve never had any trouble with typing on a touch screen just as fast as my old Blackberry. Especially if you have autocorrect.

Autocorrect is more often slowing me down. It's only rarely correct.

Yep. Autocorrect's one of the first things I turn off on any device. I'd rather have a misspelled word than an entirely wrong word.

Case in point: people spelling "definitely" as (I assume) "definately" only to be autocorrected to "defiantly" without noticing. That sort of "correction" completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

This does not compute. I am a fast typer on all mediums, but a touch screen is just so slow compared to physical. I think I got around 80 wpm on my blackberry, there is no way I could do that on a touch screen. And iPhone autocorrect is terrible with any sort of tech jargon - frequently causing manual corrections.

it is just a habit. Here is a video from 2010 with 97 wpm on iPhone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNcTE5WJGdw

I've found that haptic feedback helps. My first smartphone was a handmedown first-gen iPhone, so I didn't really understand the point of haptic feedback because I wasn't exposed to it, but upon switching to a Galaxy SII and feeling a tactile response with each press I've yet to look back.

Every time haptic feedback turns off for "power saving" when I'm running low on battery, I immediately wonder how anyone ever manages to type anything at all without mucking things up all the time.

I'd still prefer a physical keyboard, though.

I can type so much faster with Swype-style typing. I completely don't understand the die-hard keyboardists

I could touch type on blackberry far faster and more accurate than swype. Swype is better than nothing but it's not as good as the bb keyboard was.

My issue with Swype-style - after having used it for about 8 years before switching to a phone with a keyboard (Android Blackberry) - is that having to wait for each word to confirm it got the right one is where the slowdown is. Touch-typing means I can keep going without confirming, because when I do mis-type, I can feel that my finger wasn't positioned correctly without having to do any visual confirmation.

Based on reactions from co-workers though, it seems I'm much more efficient at touch-typing than most of them, even on a fullsize keyboard. And the experience does translate to a physical phone keyboard, even at the smaller size, so that may well be where some of the disconnect is.

Note also when touch-typing on my phone, I get the full speed by using both thumbs, not just one.

For me and for a number of email "power users" whom I know, Blackberry strictly dominates iPhone email experience.

Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer.

But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setting appointments, reading attachments, etc.).

iPhone is worse at that particular thing -- but vastly more capable broadly speaking for a universe of other things.

BlackBerry couldn’t read many attachments let alone edit them. Modern smart phones can run a decent version of MS Office.

The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.

I'm still pretty confused about what blackberry did well. It sounds like they had a workflow that people that liked it liked.

Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?

Search. I could instantly search basically my entire inbox in 2005. That was the power of BES. I still can't do that today on Android or iOS. If I'm looking for an email from 6 months ago or last year it takes FOREVER to find.

I just did a search for a keyword from mail that I knew would be old - 2005. It found it instantly.

I always thought their killer feature was the fact that they'd operate on pager frequencies, so you could get an email (or at least a portion of it) in what was quite often a cellular deadzone. Largely moot these days between the proliferation of WiFi and LTE repeaters.

The BlackBerry phones didn’t operate on pager frequencies did they?

It wouldn't surprise me if the BB push notifications worked over pager frequencies. I can't find anything online about how they actually worked, but the original two-way communications device from RIM was called the "Inter@ctive Pager"[0]. If I were to guess, I'd say it is possible the push notification went over a pager frequency and included a snippet of the message. The device would then be able to request the full message over the cellular data network. The pager networks of the time were more robust (and travelled longer distances), so the BB would be able to received the notice of a message (and part of the payload) even in a cellular dead-zone.

But, that's just me speculating...

[0] http://www.braddye.com/newsletters/2010/n22jan2010.html

So the first ones used pager networks, the next generation used cellular.

The push service was quite good IMHO. Every carrier that supported BlackBerry Internet Service had a leased line or VPN to the RIM NOCs. The phones would connect to BIS servers at the carrier which then communicated over these backhauls to RIM. Because it was all so deeply integrated in the carriers network (I believe the BIS servers acted as a Gateway GPRS Support Node), the BIS servers knew exactly where on the network each phone was, so they could send essentially a UDP packet directly to the device, which was listening on a particular port. No long standing TCP connections, and of course if the device didn't acknowledge messages, they were queued at RIM for when the device reentered coverage.

Email was provided by a server side process that opened MAPI (the original exchange RPC protocol) connections to exchange mailboxes and asked to be pinged if there were changes in mailboxes. When that happened, the BES server would pull the changes, package them, forward them to the RIM NOC over the proprietary SRP protocol, which would locate the right carrier, send the packet over the backhaul, and then from the carrier it would make its way to the phone.

Source: used to run a BES server

This sounds worse than modern ActiveSync - which Apple introduces support for in 2010 (2009?). You also didn’t have to send all of your email through BlackBerry’s servers.

With ActiveSync, my email will usually reach my phone/cellular watch/iPad before it reaches my computer.

True. The messages were encrypted, but ye if RIM went down, no email for you. Even if your email server was working fine.

Well, it being encrypted doesn’t help when RIM had the encryption keys and would give them up to any government entity.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/blackberry_gi...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/18/blackberry-ceo-wont-say-...

So that applied to consumer users. When connecting via BES, the connection was end to end encrypted, RIM never had the keys.

> Except I can count on one hand the number of fortune 500 enterprises that moved to gsuite over o365.

That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer.

> This reads like someone who lives in the valley and thinks the valley is in any way reflective of corporate America.

I don't live in that valley, and I fully know that it doesn't reflect the rest of US or world, and that is why, indeed, enterprise UX does suck! :)

I think we agree... I'm not hearing an argument from you that it's because of superior UX that people are sticking to O365.

> That's maybe another way of showing that UX is not the winning differentiator in enterprise that it is in consumer.

But it is. That and useful features. Both of which Office has, and GSuite has not.

I don't remember the name of that "Word lite" program that was included with Windows for free around Vista/7, which could open less sophisticated .doc files and was a default binding for .rtf files. But compared to Microsoft Office, GSuite is like that program, but on the web.

i believe this was called WordPad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPad

Yes, that one, thanks!

Again this goes down to usability vs features.

Word has a lot of features and, for certain publishing needs, these are important.

But what gsuite adds is usability. You no longer need shared drives. You no longer need to email docs around, you no longer need Spec_new_v3_new.doc.

I don't even need my computer any more, I can use anyone's.

I also don't need the immense amount of publishing and formatting options word provides. What I need to do is create documents that can be shared and collaborated on easily.

I have worked in enterprise for 20 years and have always been watching the vast majority of my colleagues (by the numbers) struggle to make anything but basic use of Office. My experience has been that there are a few advanced users who enjoy the mastery of it enough that they know it inside out, but the majority of enterprise workers really just do pretty basic stuff with it.

Meanwhile, the killer app of G Docs (collaboration) is a very frequently unanswered need. People emailing attachments with ridiculous names like "contract_v2_final_finalforreal.docx", making conflicting edits that cannot be reconciled, carrying USB sticks around because their PPT presentation is too big for email and they can never figure out how to use shared folders, etc.

Hey, I'm looking into a solution to this problem, I wondered if there was a way to DM you about your experience? I've been working on something and would love to hear thoughts around how people solve this where gDocs etc don't. Thanks

Skype for business makes me think of one of Guy Kawasaki’s 3 reasons for a business to exist: to right a wrong.

Skype for business is an abomination, it’s morally wrong, it’s an evil that must die.

I’m hoping Zoom can murder it viciously.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I got to be a fly on the wall in an organization meeting where we realized our third-party UI vendor had no roadmap for internationalization.

That was an uncomfortable day. ;)

Heh, I know of a major health record software that can’t handle time zones. So the hospital system has its instances sharded that way.

Once you cross a time zone, your records are much harder to access.

Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour?

There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.

No, but it is an interesting problem. If something is done every 4 hours at standard times, do you shift all standard times by an hour so it’s still every 4 hours or have a gap of 3 or 5 hours for that task.

I kinda like the idea of regular scheduled downtimes of stable systems, just for real experience on downtime procedures.

Interestingly it is rather straightforward to meet. It is very difficult to prove compliance. Most sites with web front ends should be ada/508 compliant, but documenting it is similar to other paperwork exercises (iso9000) that cost a lot but have little real impact.

Excel is programming, it just doesn’t call itself that so people won’t get scared off.

It doesnt have to be though, its also a great whiteboard for brainstorming and mindmapping. It works for things besides numbers and functions.

Sure people could use notepad, onenote, powerpoint, other proprietary software, but they are comfortable in the grid like ridgularity of excel.

I wanted to do everything in Excel lately, but it (at least 2013 that I'm stuck with) seems to be a horrible frankensteinian mishmash of features that don't work together. For instance, there almost seems to be the infrastructure for building a virtual database in a spreadsheet, but there are a million different things that trip you up, like the not-quite-integration of PowerPivot, the use of DAX instead of SQL, the missing VBA interface for crucial things. I still don't know why you can use OData from Excel, but then you add something to the data model and try to get to it from PowerPivot, and you don't have permissions for the exact same URL and then the whole thing gets corrupted.

Within Office, it seems more practical to do ambitious things with Access, although that has its issues too. I apparently completely corrupted a database I've been using just by pasting part of a SQL statement that was >= 1024 characters as part of a VBA script.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Breaking down work into steps. Not all top-level tasks are truly of equal size.

Micro tasks are good.

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.

That's... Kind of hilarious.

I'm assuming your employer has never heard of printers or copy-paste. ;)

Or forwarding, or clicking "archive" instead of "delete", or screenshots...

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.

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".

This is exactly right. It doesn't stop espionage or a rogue employee - it is not supposed to; but it does stop inadvertent duplication all over the place in ways the company could be liable for due to inaction or insufficient policy around PII, etc.

Not every employer hires folks like you who go out of their way to print confidential emails so they can violate customer privacy.

MANY employers have folks who unless you put a speed bump in their way would have employees inadvertently sync their entire email history onto their kids computer or a random computer while traveling.

The ENTIRE POINT of MANY of google's settings is to allow for those railings to be put in place. This is so employees who aren't out to abuse data can go about their day with reduced risk of inadvertently screwing up.

This is a big risk factor (I'd argue a much bigger risk factor than intentional employee misbehvior).

Additionally, once these controls are in place you can actually drive even better security where needed - it is possible to do a USB / printer / no phone lockout for high security ops - and is done when needed (very rarely). Thin clients are actually popular here - remote desktops another layer making it harder to dump the x million records out of system.

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.)

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

Same with SAP.

> 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.

> 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.

Exactly right, even to the point of bringing up a few specific industries that do in fact have specialized needs.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I posit the BYO device went forward because enterprises realized they could make people pay for their own equipment.

Office 365 isn't even gdpr compliant.

the prospect of running an enterprise on gsuite is..amusing.

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)

Does 200k headcount count as enterprise?

iirc Salesforce uses gsuite internally

BBVA is a bank with 140,000 employees, and they use G Suite. Office 365 and G Suite aren't small business tools anymore.

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.

define small?

My partner worked here - 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

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