It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.
We're a little more aggressive with multi-threading but you have to understand these code-bases are massive legacy things whose value comes from a ton of business logic accreted over 25 years.
I assure you I've heard of multiple CPU cores (before this I did high-performance physics simulations across thousands of cores) but I still don't have the first idea how to get something to execute on a background thread in this codebase.
Renting software is ridiculous, but at least the incentives are kind of pointed in the right direction.
For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem
Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,
Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much!
Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.
E.g. It is well understood that users rely on a hotkey "a lot." It is not understood that users are so familiar with a hotkey that, if you relocated it on the keyboard, productivity would decrease 40% for 3 months.
That distinction is fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.
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[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.
It's been my experience that you get crappy software, produced with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, if your developers don't know your users.
Most of the time I experience a scenario of the engineer or support person saying "Show me what you are doing" only for the user to show some weird and non-logical (to the engineer) way of doing some task, and the engineer or support person replying "Well you should be doing it this other completely different way"
Product designers on the other hand.
Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.
There's a class of software I want rapid improvements to.
And frankly there's a class of software I want to just work and not move the needle needlessly. Even with Adobe, I have NO idea why I have to have 27 processes constantly running to check for updates; why it actually performs updates that grind my system all the time; I can't honestly say that I have personally advanced and started using anything new or different in Photoshop in many many years, let alone MS Word. :-/
(understanding this is a different use case to original-original-poster; most of the software I DO want to advance - our database engine or process scheduler or OS monitoring software can always get better as far as I'm concerned, etc.
Many people aren't just robotic, they're straight up ritualistic.
I've worked with several people that are absolute wizards at PowerPoint, love to get new features, and quickly integrate them into their workflows.
But those same people have absolutely no mental framework for how Excel works. They'll quite literally use a physical calculator (or their phone's calculator app) in tandem with Excel, treating Excel as a glorified text editor that lets you do cell-by-cell text placement/formatting. They have such a weak grasp of how Excel works that any tiny change whatsoever doesn't just cause extreme frustration, but also extreme anxiety as they scramble to re-establish the thin veneer of usability they previously held.
Having witnessed the above more than once, I've taken to heart the level of naivety that should be presumed when creating UX flows and documentation.
Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,