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Comment by rvanmil | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

honestly if 'fast' is your metric - they'd not be on windows

I agree, it’s their business priorities which result in engineering that leads to bad software. What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs. All of the customization and dynamic crap can go out of the window that way, which will allow engineers to make things fast and user friendly again.

The problem is that the definition of "just for your needs" lasts about a year, max, and then your needs change. Businesses are constantly re-organizing and engaging in process engineering, and this creates rapidly changing needs. Go through this a few times and at some point you will get the bright idea that you need to create some DSL/platform metaframework to allow customers to auto-configure what "just for your needs" means or else you will be buried in a pile of feature requests that your tool doesn't have but the competitor does. And then third parties will come along and you'll want to package their work to create pluggable tools that customers can install. Then you'll spin up app store.

Then throw in all the regulatory and compliance stuff that businesses need to trust storing their data with you. Add EU regulations and you will end up building data centers in different parts of the world. Then you will want to spin up training to use your custom DSP. And localization packs. Then you will need APIs to pull data in and out as customers will fear lock-in and they'll want you to integrate nicely with some other service. Then you have to figure out how those APIs work with your metalanguage. Then other customers will demand the ability to reskin everything with their corporate logos, custom login screens, support for SMS and two factor auth, support for third party identity providers, scripts to enroll/unenroll users, admins will want scripting platforms to manage all the complexity created by adding the other features, Etc.

>What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs.

the problem is not everyone can afford a IT dept with software programmers that can build out custom software.

If IT is not their core most companies seek out software that is already out there with somewhat decent reputation.

edit: at one of my previous job, they have a in-house software that was build with older technology that needs to rebuild. they outsourced it to Capgemini. it started when i join the company and by the time that i was out (4 yrs). they still didn't get it covert. they kick out Capgemini around two years in and hand it to another consulting company and the new consulting company junk out Capgemini's code and start from scratch.

i'll like to know more details on how they botched this project, it always make me curious how they botch it up for 4 years and two million wasted.

> the problem is not everyone can afford (a IT dept with) software programmers that can build out custom software.

Agreed, though isn't this often just a problem at a strategic level? C-level doesn't understand digital transformation, so there is no strategy and no budget, or they think they can just buy it with platforms like Salesforce.

Having custom software built is only getting cheaper because our development tools are getting more and more powerful and managed cloud infrastructure is extremely compelling due to removing most of the ops from devops and being cheap at the same time, so costs could hardly be an argument anymore, right?

But yeah, there's always the risk of hiring a firm that has a quality problem, or uses terrible tools to build software in the first place (which is what I was referring to with the joke in my first comment in this thread).

Enterprise software is a minefield, how can we fix that? :)

I have personally seen two 30+ million projects trashed. Not including the wasted man hours spent internal employees to support the consultants. IT projects have an incredible failure rate.

Salesforce was brought in by many sales teams, initially, because the internal systems were too slow to write and the sales teams could just setup salesforce and get going!

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