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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

When I was first getting into software dev, I thought 'enterprise' meant 'industrial grade', 'powerful', 'high-performing'.

Then I actually met some enterprise software, and realised that it means 'expensive', 'bespoke', 'one-off', and usually 'janky'.

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Enterprise means it has SSO and a support contract

Lol, so true

It means you are paying for a support contract. Whether you actually have one time will tell.

Only seasoned engineers will understand you are not joking.

Sorry, the very simple thing you’re trying to do is too complex and non-standard for our support team to handle. We’ll gladly sell you a consultant for $400/hr. He’ll work on modifying our system, and then we’ll sell those modifications to everyone else.

And in-transparent pricing and this annoying dude that asks you once in a while if everything is okay, usually before the renewal.

To me it always meant needlessly complex and overspecced for what's needed. I think probably due to Java's enterprise years.

Why solve the problem directly when you can abstract everything away into FactoryFactoryImplementationInterfaceFactorys, and have something that is both a memory-hog and completely unassailable to any normal programmer seeking to understand it or make changes?

Enterprise quality software is a just a DOS application, probably written for dBase III, that has been rolled forward to the present day.

Those old school systems are often much more stable than any newer systems. Autozone looks to use something like that and I’ve never seen them have issues as a customer.

In recent history I've done some work on Pick/Multivalue systems first deployed in the 1980s that have been rolled forward today and I love every minute of it. Dick Pick had some opinions and most of them were pretty good.

"Enterprise" mainly describes the sales and support process, not the nature of the product itself. That said one does influence the other.

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