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0 pointsjerf5y ago0 comments

I'd lay money it's not the engineers, but management. If management doesn't put performance as a top-tier requirement, there's no way to stuff enough features into a program for something like an office suite (already half-crippled by having to run in a browser) and keep the performance high. It's too much work for even the engineers who care to take it on in the cracks & edges around their other projects... it has to be something management prioritizes.

Seems like this is how all "enterprise-grade" software becomes a pain to use. Usability and performance get short shrift below getting the next 100 bullet-point-features and before you know it the only computers in the world that can run it decently are the developer's, where it still is frankly only on the edge of usability and far from where it would be a joy to use.

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lazide5y ago· 3 in thread

There is another factor with enterprise software - people build workflows around it that are business critical (think checklists and HOW-TO guides), and taught to folks that just want to turn the crank and get things done, not mess around with the latest changes (in general).

UX changes (usually what people mean when they say ‘usability) are problematic because they often require disruptive changes, retraining people, and breaking someone’s business for awhile if they can’t know this is coming and stage it out properly. That is a good way to lose customers.

Performance improvements over unlocking some major business area with a feature are not as high priority - because an extra .5% in cost to an existing customer is usually not as important as unlocking another 10% of sales.

Over time it can of course kill the product if not addressed. It’s easy to see how the incentives lead people there though.

And for an enterprise, they already pay people to do things they aren’t excited to do every day - why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either? As long as it works, it works.

jerfOP5y ago

"why should they care the software is motivating when people already clean toilets, deal with retail customers, and mop floors without any of those being exciting either?"

Efficient. I'm not looking to enterprise software to provide personal affirmation in life, but if it takes me 5 minutes of staring at loading screens to do something I ought to have been able to do in 15 seconds, that's that much lost productivity, and it multiplies over days, months, years, and across employees.

Moreover, while supermegaultra performance tuning may be expensive, many performance improvements can be had for much less than the cost of time they are losing people, and many others can be obtained relatively cheaply if they are simply something that is kept in mind at all parts of the design process rather than completely ignored until it can't possibly be ignored any more. To a large degree, I'm not asking for these companies to make a moon shot to make me slightly happier... I'm asking for them to pick the freaking low-hanging fruit that is right in front of them, and, ideally, to do so on an ongoing basis. Computers are pretty fast nowadays, you don't really have to try that hard to put something on the screen in less than 30 seconds.

lazide5y ago

For sure - but you’re still thinking about it from the using side, not the purchasing/management side.

We all know how dysfunctional management can be, and IMO this is more a symptom of the disconnect between management and the employees resulting in bad business performance.

It’s clear whoever is doing the purchasing either doesn’t care, doesn’t know, or has to pick the option due to another checkbox somewhere they can’t control. The people who know have no control over the tools they are using.

It’s amazing how pathological organizations can be.

hiptobecubic5y ago

It is exactly this. Try competing with a company like Google or Microsoft for a giant contact with a Fortune 500 company, where the person making the decision doesn't have to use the products and their primary concern is the cost of training and migration.

"Your employees will be happier" is not on anyone's radar.

"Does it work with our company's authentication system from 2003?"

"Does it support playing ogg vorbis files embedded in spreadsheet cells?"

"The director of sales won't consider it for their department unless you add this particular feature that they are used to from product X, even though they don't actually do any selling anymore and it makes no sense in our own product and will require special-case handling for all maintenance in perpetuity. They have a hunch that it's valuable."

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