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Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

Explains how ServiceNow can be so popular yet so awful. They sell to the IT department who staffs up a team of solution architects and lock themselves in.

Usability of the software be dammed (it took years before even urls were shareable).

Slack was a revelation where its pricing model encouraged bottoms up adoption (only pay for seats used) and they encourage feedback from everyone (unlike Google docs where it takes an admin to report a bug, maybe).

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If you think ServiceNow is awful, then you clearly haven't used the alternatives.

Believe it or not, there are users (not buyers) that _love_ ServiceNow for what it can do. Usually because what came before was a mixture of manual process, spreadsheet hell, or some living nightmare like BMC Remedy (at least for ITSM use cases).

>where it takes an admin to report a bug

Unfortunately most products seem to conflate "report a bug" with _enterprise support_.

ServiceNow is great if your project/architecture people are really great. The mistake is expecting that OOTB features will be enough (with only a few tweaks) or that the product itself will steer you toward best pratices (NOPE!). Its a bag of great parts which require extremely careful assembly and a disciplined approach in implementing the simplest, and most elegant build. YAGNI. Case>Req>RITM>SCTASK is a lot of layers of bloat just for a single user request.

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