Looks Like a Cow,Swims Like a Dolphin,Quacks Like a Duck,It Must Be Enterprise Software

The classic saying is if you buy SAP/Oracle, you don't customize the software suite to fit your company, you customize your company to fit the software.

"...or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company...."<p>At a hospital near where I live that shall remain unnamed, I found a job that seemed perfect for me on their site.<p>Except when I went to apply for it -- not joking -- the application was so incomprehensible and novel-long that I just gave up.<p>I can't imagine they got the best people with such an application process, though perhaps they got the most persistent ones, and the ones with no better prospects.

Lots of reasons why, but mostly because the buyers aren't the users in most cases. If users got to pick what they could use in a big company it'd be a WAY different story.

Worthy link from the site's comment section:<p>Zawinski's Law<p><i>Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the Law of Software Envelopment) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.</i><p><a href="http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html</a>

What a cock and bull story (<i>sic</i>.)<p>You know how Fred Brooks said to "build one to throw away"? You just can't do that with Enterprise software because the businesses that use it need it to keep living.<p>You know all those little things you learn as you go along, and you begin to really understand the problem, and how to solve it properly? You can't do that with Enterprise software either, because everything else relies on what you choose already; and even worse, changes in the environment are coming in all the time that you must adapt to first. That's hard enough, even with a stable (if flawed) foundation to work from.<p>You can iteratively <i>adapt</i> it, but you can't iteratively <i>improve</i> it.<p>It's a problem of legacy, of network effects, of debugged/tested/working code and of something relied on so strongly that you can't afford to mess with it.<p>Joel says you can't improve these things. You <i>can</i> - but it's a research problem. "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (<i>rewrite code from scratch</i>) <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html</a>

There's no incentive for enterprise software to be sexy or provide a good user experience. Lotus Notes is the classic example: you connect to archaic server names, the idea of displaying messages as threads will never happen, menus are counter-intuitive, it's absurdly slow.. I could go on. Ok, so I get that once your organization has tied to Lotus Notes, the cost of replacing it is absurd -- especially if you build applications on the platform. What makes no sense to me is that the visual interface has remained virtually unchanged since I started using it (Jan '06), and the new Webmail pilot looks just as bad. There's a lot of things Lotus Notes can't easily improve. But there's just as many they -can- improve that they don't for some reason.

So is the platypus God's version of Enterprise Software?

A big part of it is that once you get to a system for many tens, hundreds or more people, the basic requirements are so big that there are no real choices beyond the main one or two competitors, and one will be ahead for one reason or another.<p>Users have no voice, but that's only part of the problem - the time it would take to evaluate New Competitor C just to cover all the unspoken requirements is prohibitive. You can be pretty confident that <i>because they claim</i> nice sounding features and a simple interface, that's proof that they haven't been around to gain enough of the unspoken requirements - if they had, they wouldn't have nice sounding features and a simple interface anymore. Bit of a catch 22, really.<p>Unspoken requirements in the Windows world are things like "... and has a web interface", "... works on a terminal server", "reports integrate into central management program X", "has an Outlook plugin", "tolerable support for user permissions", "incomprehensible massive logfile", and so on. Either things that a program which incorporates all of them will be cumbersomly big by necessity, and/or an established competitor for several years with a few versions under its belt.