Enterprise software is a pig dressed up with lipstick from an army of sales and marketing drones.
Never underestimate the power of sales quotas, rolex watches, conferences, booth babes, president's club trips, expense accounts, and people yacking on their phones in airports talking about getting to the "decision makers."
You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.
> You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.
Got any examples? I have never seen an organization where that was actually true, nor anywhere close.
I'm job hunting right now and one of my must-not-haves for any employer is that they're sales driven instead of product driven. I'd rather work for university IT department than at Oracle.
It's strange how pervasive poor UI/UX (and poor software in general) is in enterprise software.
I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (though I am sure some exist; I suspect Odoo falls in this category, but only because it's open source), they all just kind of exist as a means to an end, despite most ERPs being at least 50% of the chrome tabs an office worker keeps open all day.
I wonder if this phenomenon serves as evidence that many decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes. Even marketing around most ERPs is designed this way: bulleted list of boxes checked off with almost zero real product previews
>The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do.
My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that
1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure.
2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc.
3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly)
4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation.
5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years
This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is
1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team
2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector
3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process )
4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) )
these things exists independently of the UX for the final user.
One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step.
so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.
While those are some big hurdles, I still don't believe they should impede decent UX.
After spending years tweaking poor UXes and months building good ones, I really think good UX starts with a strong foundation.
If a stack starts out with integrity and grows to the appeal of enterprise clients, adding SOAP isn't suddenly going to transform it from a modern SPA to being a crappy session-state adled 2008 MVC experience.
If anything, with a good REST API, you can probably generate SOAP bindings rather easily.
Odoo is a great example of this. It supports enterprises globally yet the software is still rather robust by comparison to the market.
decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes
Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.
I can't tell you how true this is. The first company I worked for merged with another org, and one of their muckity mucks was given the Director of Innovation position or something equally vague, whilst I was in charge of everything IT. It was absolutely shocking to me how much stuff he did was just bring in consultants he had a past relationship with who would promptly sell him some piece of overpriced enterprise software and charge us huge sums of money to integrate. Didn't matter if there was already a system in the org doing that, didn't matter how our evaluation went, didn't matter if it failed load testing, shove it in. And somehow after every project he was involved with failed, he just kept failing upwards.
Anecdote: I held out for years with QuickBooks Desktop waiting for something like Odoo. My cofounder was the one who found it, and virtually our entire business runs on top of Odoo now that they’ve made their pricing sane.
It’s an absolute pleasure to use, especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. And it’s fast on even a modest server as long as your database isn’t gasping for resources. Beautifully and simply designed from a UX/UI perspective, IMHO. Especially compared to the monstrosities that most other ERP vendors are putting out. Looking at you, Oracle.
The Jira of HR tooling. Technically does everything you need it to, but leaves you sweaty and frustrated upon completion of even the simplest of tasks.
> Workday could conceivably build its own encrypted database of our information, across our different jobs and applications. When you leave Spotify to go work at Netflix, your profile could follow you, allowing you to more easily apply to the job. The multiplying powers of tech could scale to free us of our busy work, as promised.
Maybe it's better they don't build such a shared profile, or soon hiring managers can see you've applied to 200 jobs and been rejected from all of them.
This right here is a 8 year project that would cost 1.2 billion dollars. And it would fail miserably before it got out of the requirements analysis phase.
This is the same story with Salesforce. I am building a new age quoting solution (CPQ) at my latest startup and talk to businesses of various stages regularly. Our biggest "competitor" out there right now is Salesforce CPQ. There is not one person that I have met so far who has not said that onboarding, configuring and then successfully using Salesforce CPQ is a painful process. What SF CPQ does in weeks, sometimes months, we (and our contemporaries) are able to accomplish in hours. And yet the huge entry barrier exists for startups like us is because SFDC has got the CRM market completely covered. Just because they are able to do CRM well, they are then able to build a walled garden around it.
they are then able to build a walled garden around it.
Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education."
And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.
Is everything in Salesforce land like this? I worked with a nonprofit and we tried to implement their nonprofit solution, and it was exactly like that.
One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.
Unfortunately yes. The fact that you cannot do anything without a partner is truly mind boggling. From what I have learned so far, you end up paying anywhere between 1x-3x of the licence cost to the partner just to get it implemented and make small changes here and there. It's crazy how high the TCO of this software is in this day and age.
> Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. "It's like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate."
Workday's success is 100% explained by Arvind Narayanan's hypothesis that enterprise software is like baby clothing.[a] If I may quote him: "There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It's irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It's worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded. Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work. The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do."
HR managers, rank-and-file employees, and job applicants have never been Workday's customers. Its actual customers are the corporations seeking to quantify, manage, and control those users. Inevitably, it's them, the users, who find themselves "botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Couldn't have said it better!
I genuinely feel troubled by how accurate this is.
When the little startup I was at got acquired by a megacorp we had to migrate a lot of tooling. It shocked me how different some of the software is in a philosophical sense. When you only have fifty people it's hard not to think about the plight of your code monkeys, even when you're getting schmoozed by a sales rep.
Once you manage to put a couple of elevator rides and a secretary between the decision maker and the work-doer you can go full principal-agent and really take a big old dump into the air con in the programmers' sub-basement.
There is far more enterprise software than most people realise, everybody complaining about Jira, Salesforce, SAP. It gets much worse once you go to special-purpose/domain-specific enterprise software.
It depends. Some niche software is so entrenched that they have no incentive to improve. But other domains are nimble enough that there's still a fight for market share.
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Never underestimate the power of sales quotas, rolex watches, conferences, booth babes, president's club trips, expense accounts, and people yacking on their phones in airports talking about getting to the "decision makers."
You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.
To the point that I now consider "enterprise" a euphemism for "substandard".
Takes a little of the shine off Star Trek.
Got any examples? I have never seen an organization where that was actually true, nor anywhere close.
I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (though I am sure some exist; I suspect Odoo falls in this category, but only because it's open source), they all just kind of exist as a means to an end, despite most ERPs being at least 50% of the chrome tabs an office worker keeps open all day.
I wonder if this phenomenon serves as evidence that many decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes. Even marketing around most ERPs is designed this way: bulleted list of boxes checked off with almost zero real product previews
>The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do.
https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
It's a classic principal-agent problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that
1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure.
2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc.
3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly)
4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation.
5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years
This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is
1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team
2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector
3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process )
4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) )
these things exists independently of the UX for the final user.
One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step.
so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.
After spending years tweaking poor UXes and months building good ones, I really think good UX starts with a strong foundation.
If a stack starts out with integrity and grows to the appeal of enterprise clients, adding SOAP isn't suddenly going to transform it from a modern SPA to being a crappy session-state adled 2008 MVC experience.
If anything, with a good REST API, you can probably generate SOAP bindings rather easily.
Odoo is a great example of this. It supports enterprises globally yet the software is still rather robust by comparison to the market.
Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.
It’s an absolute pleasure to use, especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. And it’s fast on even a modest server as long as your database isn’t gasping for resources. Beautifully and simply designed from a UX/UI perspective, IMHO. Especially compared to the monstrosities that most other ERP vendors are putting out. Looking at you, Oracle.
Maybe it's better they don't build such a shared profile, or soon hiring managers can see you've applied to 200 jobs and been rejected from all of them.
This right here is a 8 year project that would cost 1.2 billion dollars. And it would fail miserably before it got out of the requirements analysis phase.
Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education."
And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.
One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.
Workday's success is 100% explained by Arvind Narayanan's hypothesis that enterprise software is like baby clothing.[a] If I may quote him: "There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It's irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It's worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded. Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work. The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do."
HR managers, rank-and-file employees, and job applicants have never been Workday's customers. Its actual customers are the corporations seeking to quantify, manage, and control those users. Inevitably, it's them, the users, who find themselves "botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Couldn't have said it better!
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[a] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
When the little startup I was at got acquired by a megacorp we had to migrate a lot of tooling. It shocked me how different some of the software is in a philosophical sense. When you only have fifty people it's hard not to think about the plight of your code monkeys, even when you're getting schmoozed by a sales rep.
Once you manage to put a couple of elevator rides and a secretary between the decision maker and the work-doer you can go full principal-agent and really take a big old dump into the air con in the programmers' sub-basement.