Why Enterprise Software Sucks
I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.<p>If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix philosophy that so many designers and developers prefer. Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. People hate them because they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.<p>But that&#x27;s the same reason they can sell into law firms and oil refineries and animation studios and all those other very diverse businesses.<p>And most enterprise software sucks because 1) writing complex, highly configurable software is hard and 2) very few companies have the billions of development dollars the above handful of companies have to throw at the problem to try to make it tractable.<p>That the end user isn&#x27;t the purchaser isn&#x27;t going to change that fundamental reality that businesses are complicated.