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Business Software Needs A Revolution
An anonymous reader writes "According to a Businessweek Online article, today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would."
it's no accident that Sales and Marketing is S&M.
They just chose who is in the bondage.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
There are some good points made in this article. Working at a
software company, there is quite frequently an incredible amount
of pressure to get new features in as quickly as possible.
However I don't think that phenomenon is ever going to go away.
To a certain extent there is market pressure to add new features
to your product, people always want the new bells and whistles.
There has been a tremendous market pressure over the last decade
to add bells and whisltes over bullet proofing your code.
Perhaps there will be some pressure now towards bullet proofing
your code, but until customers stop demanding more features and
start demanding quality code, software won't change.
There are some companies out there (M$ being the prime example)
that don't add much in the way of new functionality, but rather
repackage things, move buttons and menus around and make the new
incompatible with the old. At the same time they only fix
certain bugs, but leave others alone. Yet people buy their crap
at record rates.
I think most developers would love to see a move towards
software quality rather than software features, but until the
market dictates that as a priority it just won't happen.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Marketing speak does not translate to real world performance.
Seems to me that if I was spending 100K plus on a software package (or system) I would test it first to make sure it fit my needs, as opposed to listening to a marketing drone...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would
What?!, a dishonest sales person? Never!
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Film at 11.
They lie to their developers when they say 'All we need is this one feature to make customer 'X' happy'.
They lie to their customers when they say 'And this feature our developers just put in will make your life easier'.
The hell of it is that when developers put in 60-80 hour weeks coding bloat features, the salesmen are the ones who get bonuses for making a big sale.
The problem here is not so hard to see.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I'd love to see a survey of how many people use the huge number of convoluted and complex review and version features provided by Microsoft Word. The addition of these feature seems to represent the only major change from one version to the next of this microsoft suite, nowadays...
You mean the Sales and Marketing department oversold the capabilities? Say it isn't so. On a former project, we needed to emulate a remote system for some testing. We wrote some code that responded for that system, as it was expected to, so that you always got the answer you wanted from it. It was affectionately called the Marketing Server.
Trying to keep it locked up is causing all these problems. Business would greatly benefit from free and open information--it's a win-win thing.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I've wondered for a while what the point was. For the price of some of these packages, you can hire 2 developers (or more!) for a year and get them to code an application that does EXACTLY what you want. As long as you stick with a fairly standard architecture and document it well it should be just as effective. Using components that have already been developed (such as various jakarta subprojects) can really speed projects like these and make them worthwhile. Most importantly, it is custom tailored for your business.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
is bloated, buggy, and too expensive
Software has been following this general trend for years now (except the too expensive part). I know this is like the "when I was your age I had to walk 50 miles in the snow up hill to school at 4am" kinda whining, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Fact is, other than watching video files and ripping cd's, why is it that you need an OS that requires more RAM than you had HD space years ago for. If you map computing oomph (mips, ram, hd, video speed/resolutions) and software functionality (say on the y axis), you'd end up with an incredibly dissapointingly near flat line. With as much horse power that we have today, we should be able to create nearly bug free software because of all the majorly powerful development tools that put all this power to good use. Instead, we have majorly bloated development tools (Rational Rose et al) and environments that focus on letting people make pretty but ill conceived ui's and make a half hearted stab at helping to improve code.
Bah, humbug.
One of the key problems is that software vendors think that they should continue to add more and more features. Each time a software vendor solves some little bullshit problem for one customer, they decide to throw it into the next version resulting is feature creep. This might be kind of cool for the geeks but it sucks for most users, especially the typical users of the software. As most of us know, as you increase the number of features, you increase the complexity. As you increase the complexity, you decrease the usabilty. Thus, paradoxically, as you help some people you hurt a lot of other people. Stated another way, the harder these vendors try to help users the more they hurt them. Usability just keeps dropping.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Once the market cleans out the Boom chaff, look for more interesting apps to come out of the consolidation. This is a market issue, not a technology issue.
> finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would.
ok 2 old jokes:
Q: what's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman?
A: the used car salesman knows when he's lieing.
Q: how can you tell if a software salesman is telling a lie?
A: his lips are moving.
Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would.
re-evaluation doesn't mean refund. It means lets spend more money and hope it works this time! (or maybe the existing vendor has an upgrade solution! we can use our relationship to get a great discount!)
The revolution has to come from the businesses who buy the software. And the sound of that revolution would be "I know what I want, I want a,b and c". Venders would be in utter shock, many will fail because they are not used to actually making what is demanded only what they think/know it should be.
no need to do any research ...
A bit off topic, but related. I got tired of trying to find a really decent store suite for e-commerce. Most of the ones which did what I needed cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, and would require additional licenses as more features or bugs got fixed and made a new version release. Going from version 3 to version 4 would be a $200 upgrade, or buying the package to include coupons would be $150.
The free or low-cost solutions did little, were hard to use, and were buggy as well.
So people really had two options. Pay plenty for good software that they would have to continue paying if they wanted to keep up to date in modules and features, or pay little or nothing and get software they would have to invest additional money into making work how they need.
So, like those before me in the free software world, it made me start my own software suite for e-commerce, to be released free under the GNU GPL license, because I would already need it for my site, so why not give it to those already in my position.
I think this is where business software will be going. A small company or a programmer will find that there is a need for a software package or suite. There will be two options, expensive lock-in software or cheap hobbling software. They will probably decide in this economy it will be easier to either build off FSF-approved-licensed software to make it work how they need, or just build their own.
I'd love to see this option work out well. An alternative to Peachtree/QuickBooks for all platforms that is XML based. Linux-based POS software for stores. Inventory management and shipping database applications.
Why spend $100,000 on such a suite when you can just build off a free project, or start your own using the knowledge you already have with the suite you couldn't get working how you wanted, open it up and reap benefits from servicing contracts and support to other companies in similar situations.
Or am I just dreaming?
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
IIRC, business expenses are paid for by the taxpayer. All costs involved in purchasing tools for the business are 100% deductible.
Keep buying my expensive software, naves!
Plebians, keep the software kings fat! BUY BUY BUY!
This is not the first time that india has been cited as an outside force. I've recently heard that there is a redmond,india.
Does anyone know about this?
What exactly, if anyone here knows, is going on in india.
This is not exactly cookie cutter automaking (or maybe it is) but what has suddenly made india appear to be a power house for software that even microsoft has noticed?
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software.
.75 FTE for a Unix Admin for on-going support. This is about 5 times the need of any of our other Unix servers, and makes me wonder how much care & feeding the system will require just because of the buggy application. From my observations, the numbers quoted in the article for fixing software don't look high at all, and may in fact be too low.
The management mindset of "do it right now", as opposed to "do it right" is costing them more in both the short- and long-term. Until prevailing attitudes are changed on the part of those making the purchasing decisions, software makers will still have little motivation to change.
My employer is looking at a $1 million+ project for HR automation. $40k of that is for the unix server, the rest for software and "services". And this was, supposedly, the best software available. The vendor also recommended a
To be honest, at least 50-90% of the cost of big software packages goes into maintaining another company, paying that company's CEOs and sales staff, paying for first level support people to misdirect your call and other things that are, to a great degree, unrelated to the quality of the software you're getting.
Think about it: for $100k, you can get package X, which does half of what you need it to do in some areas and twice what you want it to do in others. Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
If there's an OSS package that already does most of what you need, you can probably hire their developers to customize it for you quickly and at a very minimum expense. You don't even have to tell anybody about your custom code, unless you intend to release the binaries outside your company.
And of course, if you can get three companies that need a similar piece of software, you can invest in a small business that does exactly what you want and split the cost. That's how my friend's firm works...the bills are paid for by the big guys, and anything they sell on top of it is a bonus. As a result, their rates are 1/2 to 1/10th those of their pay-for-our-big-name-CEO competitors.
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'm sure you would, and I certainly would. Unfortunately in the corporate world these decisions are too often made, for "non-technical reasons" [1] by people who lack this apparently simple insight. I've seen too many inappropriate purchases made, of over-priced, under-functional software and systems that looked like it did what the purchaser thought he wanted, but in real life failed to do what the company acutally needed. Or had prohibitive costs. Or...
And I don't believe that my experience is particularly unusual.
[1] don't ask :-(
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
It has imprecise layout options.
It second guesses your decisions.
It is ginormous for what it does.
It has encouraged use of Bold, Italics, and MS Comic Sans
It sucks CPU cycles like a 40-dollar whore.
It indexes every last damn file on your PC.
It saves information that you really don't want distributed in every file.
It has an annoying mascot.
It has been ported to mac.
It is used by mac users.
It gives you hell whenever you don't want to save as a
It is far too expensive.
It has too many features.
It encourages use of MS Comic Sans
and...
It encourages use of MS Comic Sans.
Thanks.
--
WebWord.com [webword]
Industrial Strength Usability
That link isn't very usable.
You see, one of the major problems is the cost of software. The more it costs, the more the suits want it. It's like having that uber-car with redicules horsepower that you will never be able to use because you live in the heart Chicago.
You wouldn't believe the number of times I've seen MySQL passed over for Oracle when none of the Oracle features will benefit the project.
And if you wanna argue about support, I think it's a non-issue. If you need help with Oracle, do you really think you're gonna get more help calling their customer support than you would doing a little google for info on MySQL? I think not.
Another problem is with sales of software. It's like for each new version, it is number one priority to have more bullet-points on the back of the box pointing out new features. How about one bullet point that just says "faster" and another that says "more stable." That'd tickle me just right. But I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Solution? It seems like marketing needs to change more than the actual software development. If the marketing groups were able to market stability/speed instead of the beaten-horse of new features, then we'd start to see a change in software quality.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Marketing people overstate the usefulness of their products in order to sell them.
Wow.
It is because software is supposed to bend to the will of the user, not the other way around. And that is why software is so feature-laden, so mandatorilly configurable.
If you wrote yourself a business app without configuration, you are dictating to your customers exactly how they will do the business they intend to use your software to do. That's great if your customer either does not do business in this area yet, or if they already do business the same way you expect them to.
But guess what! 99% of the target customers out there do or will want to do business differently!
For example? Let's pick something we can all agree on: source code management. Now how are we going to do business? Every shop will have a subtly different answer.
And that's the problem. Customers frequently don't know how they do business, and forcing them to articulate their current processes leads to them facing this unpleasant truth. Sometimes they tell you the wrong thing. Sometimes they deliberately tell you the wrong thing.
Sometimes management gets wind of all these neat metrics that the new system will be able to measure, and those get tacked on to the requirements sheet.
Sometimes there comes a requirement to seamlessly interface will all these legacy systems. Oh, and seamlessly sort, classify, access, and audit all the legacy data too.
You get the point.
The comparison with the auto industry is similarly bogus. The auto industry has a sharply restricted list of top level suppliers (Ford, GM, BMW), has the infrastructure to provide all routine supplies (like computer units, replacement hoods, etc), has a universal interoperability standard (the road), and a standardized operator interface.
Until the requirements for Business Software becomes simple and universal, the software fulfilling those requirements will never be either simple or universal.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
The big business app vendors have mastered the buzzwords to impress the CxO's and boardrooms into believing they solve the problems. After all, if FORTUNE 100 software company whose software is used by everyone doesn't fix the problem, who can? The evaluators are shut off because the sale is predestined by the owner.
I saw this happen when my company evaluated a $2 million package by Big Software Company X and went away saying no way in hell. Then it came down from above to look into it, and $4 million and 2 years later it's still not done. The problem is, any project with that much money, and the big names on it can't (by definition) fail. So more money, more time, more frustration.
Of course, it's easy for someone so close to the implementor level to see it as management's fault. They turn around and see it as the implementors' fault for not doing it properly, since it works everywhere else so well.
They overruled the mechanics and bought the Jaguar, and don't want to look foolish and admit to the neighbors it's always in the shop. Articles like this are a positive sign though...
There's enough blame to go around to everyone in the enterprise software rip-off game:
* Buyers for not even applying common sense to outrageous claims
* Software companies for overselling and underdelivering
* The press for pandering to the software companies for ad $$$ a the risk of their readers
* Consultants and IT managers for using buggy implementations as job security
Shame on all of us.
-- $G
once the word gets out on this time to short SAP, Oracle/Peoplesoft/JD Edwards, and any other ERP/CRM maker....
The article suggests that all business software should be sold as a service. Doesn't this give remote access to the most vital part of a business' infrastructure? Is it possible to serve software remotely without creating a huge security risk?
It's interesting how life seems to mimic a Dilbert comic strip more and more.
"Sales needs X features to sell the product, while the developers say that only Y features is possible within the budget. Afterwards Sales promises customer V, Z features which are completely impossible, unless under Zero gravity."
I hate my job
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Well, I've had some experience with business software, working for Iowa Student Loan Liquidity corp. On various projects. I can tell you first hand that almost everything we did sucked. The solutions we had for various problems were incredibly baroque and stupid.
The basic problem was, most of the people there were idiots. Can't really beat around the bush, the people were morons. Now I'm sure that at some corporations it's different, if the CIO or high-ups really know their stuff, but from what I've heard a lot of times they don't. Non technical people have no way to judge the ability of programmers, so basically you're stuck with the luck of the draw. Either you end up with smart people on top, or you have idiots all the way down. In the later case, any smart hires arenâ(TM)t appreciated for their brains.
Of course, you might read this as just another self-centered geek rant about the idiocy of the rest of the world, and there's a good chance you might be right, but those are my impressions anyway. (and the place I work now seems to have lots of smart people, and we don't do bussness logic)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Sprint PCS Vission support person told me to powercycle my phone when I was having connection problems. This was to flush the buffers and cache. They said that this is a common problem with all software and said that even Microsoft Servers have to be rebooted every few days.
If we hold companies' feet to the fire and and be demanding, they may change when we start demanding refunds for buggy software.
No bugs is good bugs!
Fight Spammers!
Does anyone believe that C#/Java will improve the overall quality, standardization and total cost of ownership of enterprise software? Or is the improvement only incremental? My theory has two parts: 1. Strongly typed, managed code environments will eliminate many of the problems created under older C++/VB/COBOL programs. 2. The scope of the runtime environment, which now includes XML "web-services" and other high-level constructs will help to eliminate integration problems that called for customization in the past. I've always felt that enterprise software vendors could make their biggest improvement in sales by reducing the overall implementation costs and leaving the core features alone.
I have no idea (cough, cough!) what you are talking about! How can you call adding 12 different abstractions layers pointless? That's just ignorant.
Honk if you're horny.
This has been going on since the dawn of software.
Sales guys oversell, coders make new features, clients want something different...
Where's the insight?
I don't want to be here.
I suspect there is a small core of functionality that we all use in any given package. After that, different kinds of users use different sets of extra functionality. Just because most people use less than 25% of a program's functionality doesn't mean they are all using the same 25%.
You mentioned version control in Word as a useless example. I know people who need and use version control, and for whom the enhanced "differences" display is a great advantage.
One man's bload is another man's vital feature. Which makes my ID more ironic than usual, I suppose...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Interesting comment from someone who doesn't really understand business software. If you mean the very narrow definition of financial application - balanace of payments, General Ledger, Actuarial programs -- that might hold.
Unfortunately, so much of the software must be located locally: the OS, the authentication scheme, the network administration, email, etc.
The reason, I believe, companies are taking stock is the simple fact we keep buying software to solve the problems of the previous versions of software. We buy enterprise sofware to monitor our server software. The enterprise software is used in a global data center to track enterprise problems. Another solution is the software to move the data-center around the globe 24-7. We need more software to monitor the global-software solution which needs to be tied to the enterprise level, which requires another agent on the local host. In sum, we pay for A, and for B, and we pay for A to talk to B (plus a consultant fee).
Slashizzle my dotizzle....
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
In my experience, at the âEnterpriseâ(TM) level software quality is often inversely proportional to cost. Whenever I am given a $100K application to work on, it usually makes the worst piece of crap that Microsoft has ever published look like the pinnacle of software design.
Words to the wise: Update your resume before embarking on a large-scale ERP project.
And what the hell is MS Comic Book Sans...? ;-)
There's an old saying in the automobile and housing markets - if you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can't afford it.
I think the same applies to software - if you can't find out, on the website, how much it costs - that is, if you have to deal with a salesweasel, not just to buy the damn thing, but just to find out how much it's gonna cost to buy the damn thing, you can't afford it.
Honestly, how many of you would buy a game for your PC if the price was listed as "Contact Your MegaGalacticGames Sales Rep for pricing." (Whereupon your MGGSR will promptly ask you what kind of car you drive, and charge you $49.99 plus $10/month if you drive a Ford, and $69.99 plus $12.99 a month if you drive a Boxster.) And in either case, you're going to be calling him back next week to find out how much the map editor and the multiplayer option costs. (The answer, of course, is that the add-on cost depends on whether you use a Bic pen or a Montblanc when you signed the check for the initial purchase.)
If you make purchasing decisions for your own company, don't you have an ethical obligation to handle your employer's money with the same sort of care you would your own? If you wouldn't trust a company like MGGSR with your $49.99 gaming dollar, why should you trust them with $499,999 of your boss' money?
Personally, I take the old rule one step further.
If I have to ask how much a piece of software costs (because the vendor gives me no other way to find out, short of calling his salesweasels) not only can I probably not afford it, but odds are pretty good the software isn't worth it, even if I could afford it.
You have obviously never used Oracle.
Honk if you're horny.
Hmm, an idea might be much more modularized business software, where you pay for the features you wish to get. But they of course wish to sell as much as possible too... :-P
It's that same question ALL OVER AGAIN.
o r comparable methods)
Software sucks because there is no demand for quality software - hence software vendors do not need to implement internal engineering processes which could ensure that the software is good (to a degree).
The problem happens when you get into the Enterprise "space", where companies are accustomed to spending huge amounts of money for products that are engineered to be bulletproof.
Then they settle for products which were coded the same way consumer companies coded their freeware.
Here's how to solve this problem:
Company X claims they sell "unbreakable" software.
Their software breaks.
They get their asses sued off, or handed to them by their competitors. **IF** their competitors use an engineering process to write their software, and IF they can show that process, and prove it to their customers that they use it, and show, with numbers, how it helps.
In other words, act like a REAL software company, instead of just another dotcom trying to make a quick buck before another dotcom is tricked into buying them.
What do I mean by "engineering process?"
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
(
Yes, it costs a LOT more to do these things. But they work, and should be a great selling point for people buying software. Unfortunately, the main reason we had a "computer revolution" in the 80's and 90's is because software was so cheap to produce - because it was being written, compiled and shipped. Not engineered.
If there was a demand for quality software, then it would be worth it for a software vendor to use these processes to ensure quality. And it would be profitable, because they could charge a lot more. Some vendors DO this, and get their asses handed to them by other vendors who do not. Which brings me back to the original problem. STUPID CUSTOMERS.
So, stop whining about sucky software.
Stop spending money on software in the "Enterprise" price range, without knowing that it is, in fact, Enterprise quality.
Stop listening to Gartner Group and other ANALists. Stop reading lame trade rags. Their corruption is what allowed this market to degenerate and devolve to the state it's in today. Their job was to educate responsibly, and they failed miserably. But they did make a lot of money from SUCKERS along the way.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I live in software development. I've written software packages designed to be delivered as a service. But if I owned a company, I would have serious doubts about using a service-based product for any of my core business processes.
Why? What happens to your precious historical accounting data and sales information when ServiceCorp declares bankrupcy and ceases to exsit? Oh wait, that never happens with
I suppose the same argument could be made against outsourced payroll systems and the like, which seem to be popular and quite stable for small businesses.
Gah. I feel so old-fashioned sometimes.
I've been a software Product Manager at some of the biggest software producing companies in the world since 1995. I'm the guy an awful lot of you coders seem to dislike so much. You know, the one always asking for just one more feature to be squeezed into the release, and, oh, can we get it two months early?
There is great truth in this article, and a great lie. Software companies publish buggy, bloated product all the time, but not because it's fun and not because we marketing weenies think it's such a good idea. It's because that's what the market wants. The idea that customers are asking us to stop is a load of crap created by journalists looking to write about the latest backlash.
Sure, as the article points out, Oracle 11i was bug-ridden, but how many millions did Oracle make off it? Claiming a 11% drop in revenue in 2002 is just a tad misleading--who *didn't* see a drop in revenue in 2002? Didn't some bubble burst or something? Bottom line, customer's bought the software, bugs and all. And you can bet an awful lot of them were screaming at Oracle to get the software out as soon as possible. So where's the motivation to do it any different?
Every customer will tell you he wants just one more feature, or just one critical (to him!) bug fixed, and then he'll be happy. Bunk. Fix the bug, add the feature, and get ready for the next demand. And since what Customer A wants isn't always what Customer B wants, we get lots and lots of features, many of them aimed at a very small subset of users. Add to that all the customers screaming since the customers want it *right* *now*, and we ship software with way too many bugs, and lots of silly features. Which customer pay for.
I work at a pretty large .com, one who actually survived the bust and maintains a profit, and has a pretty significant amount of traffic. We have used ATG Dynamo for our application server for several years, partially based upon the built-in ability it has to do an MVC architecture, personalization, pools, and so forth.
However, we just completed a web application that was built using many open source components, including Struts, Validator, JUnit, and others. By using open source components we have completely divorced ourselves from using the proprietary technologies used by Dynamo, and have opened ourselves up to the possibility of using a different, and of course cheaper, application server. This would not have been possible were it not for stable, performant open soruce initiatives.
Not only is management happy because we have (potentially) saved a bunch of money, but the developers are happy because they are much more friendly towards open source than closed technologies; it is far easier to get an answer to a question via Google than it is to pay for and go through the hassle of using a support contract of some kind.
I do not mean to denegrate Dynamo at all, because it is actually a fairly good application server. The licensing costs, however, just cannot be justified when so much of the functionality provided by it is already available elsewhere, for free.
Feature-creep is often caused by "the customer is always right" syndrome. The benefits of adding the feature are considered, but not the total cost it. It is sort of like cocaine, or a greasy burger: it might not kill you today, but eventually it will, or at least make you disfunctional in the longer run. But people ignore the downsides because they grow subtley.
Further, a lot of the tweaking is for vanity purposes IMO. I could build a system that could generate complex business applications mostly just by filling in values in a "data dictionary" set of tables that describe fields and relationships between them, plus a few event handlers. However, the interface would be so boring and predictable that it would be ignored. It would lack a WoW factor that people seem to want. Managers like to stand out from the crowd. They *do* pick a system simply because it looks cool.
Finally, too many places fail to design their databases well. They let slop creap in over time, resulting in bad, poorly normalized tables. Don't let your schemas slide. Don't duplicate columns and data if you don't need to, and don't make a bunch of tiny one-to-zero-or-one tables.
Table-ized A.I.
People move a lot from business to business. Each business can't retrain the new employees on Yet Another Word Processing Application...they all stick with word or excel or powerpoint. Its easy, everyone learns it in college and the skills can be transferred from business to business.
Lock the sales people in a room with a computer and a development system. When they have coded all the features they sold, they can come out...
...and spend the next few months taking tech support calls.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Fact is, other than watching video files and ripping cd's, why is it that you need an OS that requires more RAM than you had HD space years ago for. If you map computing oomph (mips, ram, hd, video speed/resolutions) and software functionality (say on the y axis), you'd end up with an incredibly dissapointingly near flat line.
Hang on, let me try to play UT2k3 and DivX on my P100, the oldest one still around. You can measure it in spf (seconds per frame). But not only that, but we are optimizing for developer time. That is by far the most expensive part in software development, and you want them churning out new features, not dealing with optimizing stuff unless it's critical.
Even Linux and KDE/Gnome is doing that. The reason is that there seems to be an neverending well of computing power to take from, and judging by the "Who needs more than X GHz posts" it has surpassed what some people need. If computing power started to flatline, I think we'd see concern for making things faster. But why bother to put in the effort for the last 10% getting 110% * 2 = 220% in 18 months when it'll go to 100% * 2 = 200% all by itself, just by new computers?
Besides, bad UI design really can't be helped in software. Creating a good UI requires understanding the program (those buttons belong together, that belongs there, this is an either/or situation and not both etc., which an IDE just won't know. And understanding human UI perception, also a hard one. A good IDE is no replacement for a good programmer, but of course it helps.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Now I also have no love of MSWord, but FUD must be combatted:
"It indexes every last damn file on your PC."
So you forgot to turn off FindFast.
"It saves information that you really don't want distributed in every file."
So you forgot to install the GUID patch that causes it to not add your MAC address to all the files you save.
"It has an annoying mascot."
So you forgot to unclick the checkbox for the "office assistant" during the MSOffice installation. Even if you didn't install office, just rename the "actors" directory and clippy will be gone.
I don't like Word either!! But I have to use it at the office and frankly I don't think that OpenOffice is mature enough yet, so I make sure I learn ways to make Word less annoying.
I for one thought the over-priced, bloated, bug-filled software that the industry is shoveling out was the primary driver behind the OpenSource revolution. If companies aren't going to step up and write good solid code, we'll just have to do it ourselves.
You get what you pay for. Most business software development is no longer done in the countries where the customers are. There is poor understanding of the what the software should do.
for salesforce.com courtesy of BusinessWeek.
Don't read into what BusinessWeek "predicts" too much. They are almost always wrong. As an example, they were cheering on Enron's business plan as being brilliant and unstoppable when they should have been questioning their numbers and trying to uncover their pyramid scheme. As I recall, BusinessWeek had pictures of the Enron execs jumping on trampolines and laughing in the article - business journalism at its finest!
I think traditional software still has some legs yet.
Sometimes the sales guys tell the customers exactly what the tech managers/VPs say. In cases where the tech manager does not know what he/she is talking about (and lacks the necessary brain cells to admit it), it becomes a nightmare.
In such cases, the people in the trenches know what is possible, what is not, and what needs minor tweaking, and what is incompatible with the architecture. However, if the tech manager is a dipshit all the feedback goes to waste.
In such cases, it is a dishonest engineer (or head engineer) that screws up everything. The sales guys are probably more honest in that scenario.
S
A fairly apt metaphor.
"bloated, buggy, and too expensive"
just like most western governments.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Here's a revelation:
Why not think of how the world can be made a better place using computers. Then if you sell support for it, people will notice and appreciate that you have morals to go along with your ideas. Then good karma will eventually come your way and you'll be able to make a decent living on it.
Yes, It's a leap of faith, I know. But the geek world is quickly becoming the toothless bitch of the business world, and all this intrinsically useless bloatware is the result. I've thought long and hard on this topic, and this is the only way I can think of to try to reverse the trend. Small, moral, computing businesses.
Time to take a business course, people! Know your enemy!
If they aren't even smart enough to choose software that does what they need (or at least to reject stuff that doesn't) you should probably be grateful they aren't running a project to create software that does all those things they don't quite understand! Or writing the specs for such a project. Or deciding which features to drop as the deadlines whoosh by.
Besides, they'll tell you they "need it now, not in a year" (which might be a fair point, especially if they picked a system that did the job).
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Exactly what Jakarta subprojects would you suggest for building an ERP system? Or CRM? Compiere? Please.
:)
I just spent 7 months with Epicor (ERP and CRM), which is one amazingly crappy piece of software. But where's the open source choice? I mean there's not even a viable OSS replacement for Quicken let alone a ERP, CRM, or real accounting system.
If you want tons of consulting bucks, write a *good* open source ERP or CRM platform and sell the consulting/support/training. But until there's a decent *enterprise* choice, we're stuck with the crap from the vendors.
One IT manager told me "All ERP solutions suck. And whichever one you choose sucks worst."
the business softwares sit at the highest end of the food chain and hence they command the highest price. there are no government of institutional research in this area, so r&d has to be picked up by developer and eventually by customer. the buyers are typically manager and they don't understand technicality, so everything needs to be simplified which adds to more cost. the legal implications means that lots of certification, testing, trial runs. each business operates differently and huge amount of customization is needed. eventually the field is dry and has no inherent interest which means that people write for money alone which reduces efficiency. i can go on and on to explain why business softwares cost so much, but the fact is, they will remain that way for the near future.
with all the buffs that we are hearing about internet, xml etc; EDI still operates on its private network where the charges are per byte and the data format is more obscured than obfuscated perl programs.
[IMHO] It's an unfortunate reality within most enterprise settings that large scale software demos are *almost* impossible.
Take for example any system which requires your company to move to a new database to actually use the software. Most vendors would scoff (unfortunately) at loaning you adequate equipment to even run the database, let alone the staff to migrate even a trivial sample of your current data to their system. Additionally, real testing would require a mock production roll out and user training as well. Most IT departments can barely keep their heads above water with upgrades on production enviroment systems (patching, client upgrades, database upgrades, etc.) let alone running one production system and another full evaluation system. Not to even consider that most user populations would not support the testing phase. 'I don't have time to do all my work/data entry on both systems!'
I think the general problem is long term vision over short term vision. Companies want a faster buck and vendors promise a faster buck (for a bucket of bucks). In business utopia, software would be fully evaluated (hell it might work too) to ensure that the shoe fit. Unfortunately we find that everyone is either wearing shoes that are too small (you need an upgrade!) or shoes that are too big (it's scaleable...). Gotta love those software/show salesmen/women.
It's egregiously pathetic.
Bloated code isn't just the fault of the sales & marketing people, or the engineers (if you are looking from the POV of sales & marketing). The customers choose their products by comparing features that they will never use. Unless you have no competition, the bells & whistles are what sells, even though (or, maybe, especially because) the customers don't know how to use them, wouldn't know what to do with them if they ever did, and don't need to do it anyway.
I'm sure that a serious push for lean software is right around the corner. Probably happen right around the time that people begin to embrace thin client computers.
It hurts when I pee.
I've seen it first-hand in the aviation industry. I worked for a small aviation company that sold fractional ownership of airplanes, as well as provided executive jet services and medical flights. Aviation-related data was all entered into an ancient DOS program that stored data in a single .dbf file on a central server. The DOS program cost $125,000 and $15,000 a year for maintenance. This was in 2000! The company that made the software was shocked that we were able to share the application on a Citrix server (and they threatened to sue).
And you then will see "TRUE" innovations!!
It would be simple (no bloatware here) and would work the moment you started the program...
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Ihhaa...
Luckilly comes open source to the rescue with mature buissness applications that just don't mimic the old crap but comes with new ideas.. oh.. Never mind..
Show me a CRM that is not a crappy pile of MySQL and php version Alpha Alpha Beta, or so... Why don't people abstract the database away so you can connect MySQL or ORACLE. It is not like these applications stores more than VARCHAR and INTS.. or whatever.. Metabase seems to get things straight, but hey that is just php..
.. but to make a real interactive program you first have to pick Gnome, KDE or maybe Kylix or whatever.. gaahh.. it is not like you can ask any of the maillists which to pick without some serious asbestos fatigue..KDE or Gnome, which is best ?
.. did anyone say RAD.. didn't think so..
...starts here and here.
EMeta perhaps? No, Blue Martini? Wait, maybe BEA, or Oracle, or PVCS? It's gotta be iPlanet, or does that just cost 100k in hardware now?
I agree with you, in my business I wouldn't want data to be held hostage by another company I had to pay recurring fees too...
They did have a good point about being able to fix software right away and having all customers see the change. But that kind of thing is already covered by software updating mechanisms, where you can do the same thing. Then the only question is if you trust your vender enough to turn on auto-update.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> So you forgot to install the GUID patch that causes it to not add your MAC address to all the files you save.
He's not talking about that.
He's talking about the "fast save" feature of keeping hold of allllllll the edits done to a given file, so that the file really does contain the full history of all the changes ever done to it.
"Great, 500 it is!" :)
But in the new tech center of Bangalore, India, quality experts have been welcomed.
The article attacks buggy code, but has the author ever read any code/used any software that came directly from India without any American modification. Didn't think so.
Jim Kerstetter really ought to collect his thoughts before writing an article and hoping for it to be profound. All four of his "solutions" are seriously flawed.
Delivering software as a service? Yea, Microsoft has tried that with XP, and look how that turned out.
Software from India is inherintly going to be better, not because programmers in India are any smarter than programmers anywhere else (in reality there are great programmers everywhere), but because in India, there is sufficient focus on technology these days, and because businesses are being started up by tech people from IIT rather than MBAs from Harvard, that they are going to do the software right, rather than what some PHB thinks he can sell.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is the truth of business software (I mean *real* business software - something that a company runs its business off of). The customer often doesn't know what s/he wants and doesn't know how their own business works.
I spend very little time writing software anymore, and a WHOLE LOT OF TIME in meetings trying to figure out what they want.
... the problem, it's easy to find a SE that will say he'll do that, it'll do just what you want, and be done on time.
People that fall for this find out that software engineers lie. A few good ones that are able to keep their word are lost in the noise.
Too bad they can't trust us.
-pyrrho
Word corrupts files
Word can't read proprietary formats correctly, such as previous versions of Word.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Everybody I know is implementing SAP, nobody I know has implimented SAP.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"non-technical reasons" == "my 12 year old son liked the candy the demo guy gave out"
So Am I close?
Many times the high cost is to customize a program uniquely for a customer, thus the feature can not be demonstrated at that time.
Only the requirements for it exist. And the vendor's promise that they can deliver and implement something that works, and is on time, and will do what they say it will.
You can be showed something "just like it", but that is again, just a promise.
I work for a small company of about 150 people and am the only developer, it manager, web developer, telecommunications analyst, code monkey, etc etc. We have purchased GreatPlains financials in order to automate the accounts payable dept "right now". Executives always do seem to push this way and it bites the IT Managers butt later when something doesnt work because we again had to have it up and running right now. The salesperson convinced that management that it was the best solution while I was pushing for an opensource (PHP, MySQL) application that we could code ourselves but beacuse that takes time to go through all the development processes the project was axed. The GreatPlains project has already hit some shortfalls. Nobody knew GreatPlains and the salesman assured us that it would be "easy" to implement. So the management went without IT consultation and hired some accountant who said he knew GreatPlains. So therefore he could train the other accountants instead of paying the company that sold us the software. While he used GreatPlains at another company but never set it up and knew nothing about SQL or how to install software. So I had to become a GreatPlains expert over night and set it up for them. Beacuse I lacked accouting knowledge and let him setup the vendors and payable stuff he screwed it up royally and now we are paying tons of $$$ trying to fix it (he ran the system for a whole month entering transactions). We also are trying to get a Home-Brewed PHP MySQL application off the ground to manage the Accounts Payable, Marketing, and CRM. But again we are feeling the pinch of time from the higher ups and they think that by buying software from some salesperson will solve all the problems. The ETA of our home-brewed application keeps increasing because all the department that need automation dont know what to automate and cannot come to conclusions. Has anyone else had similar problems to this and how did you solve them and what recommendation can you give me in order to solve the problems we are faced?
It would be great if the purchasers of business software really wised up about the long term effects of software that is bloated, buggy and only partially interoperates with, guess what, other software that is sold by the same vendor.
The tremendous growth of free and open source software in the server arena is no surprise here. It's not just because the price is right, but also because the software is open to examine for bugs and for ways to make it interoperate with all kinds of other software and not just some other colored piece of a puzzle sold by a vendor with a clear conflict of interest.
It takes an informed and visionary CIO to see these problems and take a risk changing the status quo to improve the situation in the future. But those that are taking the risk earlier rather than later are adding that many more years of extra profitability as a consequence.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
While I totally agree with your point above, it will (probably) never happen. Here's why.
Software Engineering is very similar to other kinds of engineering (civil, mech, chem, etc) - however, since software is abstract to 95% of the people making the decisions, it's much easier to make a decision NOT to pay for that engineering. With physical engineering, its easy to point out and sell the "quality" feature. ie: if there is bad civil engineering, the bridge falls down. However, since software is an abstract concept, it is virtually impossible to sell quality to someone who has no idea what quality even means with respect to software.
Until businesses realize this and employ the right kind of decision makers, this will not change. And for the record, there are absolutely no signs that is happening.....unless you work at NASA or some other mission critical organization where software quality is recognized. To the Fortune 500's, software quality is just another buzzword to throw on top of the pile.
note: I speak from experience - 10 painful years as an implementation senior manager
The article focuses on a move towards hosted services served over the Internet. This is good, for some things, like ecards, and bad, for most things, like business critical software. It's one thing to have hired stupidity cause a network failure which loses an hour or day of work, it's another to have external companies you can't fire or even recoup losses from cause unknown downtime due to a lost connection, bad cable, squirrel, or backhoe cutting your upstream.
/. community feel for managed services? I get shivers down my spine. What if they get hacked? what if they change their licensing/cost? you're stuck, and they have your data in their format.
I think web services will be popular in the future, and will drive down the cost of packages wares, but will not replace them entirely, just because large companies and intelligent IT departments with sufficient budgets would prefer having the software locally, I'd think (again, emphasis on sufficient budgets). YMMV, if you're part of the backbone, multiple connections, etc.
I dunno, what's the
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
The person writing this article has the right idea in terms of software bugs, software complexity... but does appear to have a good understanding of what it takes to change the culture of a software organization let alone the software industry. In the commercial software business it starts with requirements management (which hardly exists) and Design. Design i.e architecture as a discipline ignores products and focuses on technology. Go to any software company in Silicon Valley and you will not be able to identify who owns product architecture, only who owns product technology. This results in a really interesting scenario where no one in the company really owns the product (i.e accountability). Since the product was never defined up-front and not owned by anyone, the quality is always going to be mediocre at best. If we take a quick stab at what the definition of product is: 1) application or system, 2) installation, upgrades), 3) administration, 4) documetation, 5) training, 6) customer support, 7) integration and consulting I've had the opportunity to work at HP and Sun in HPUX/SunOS/Solaris organizations and know first hand why quality is a problem... Its never been a priority. The way you can tell this is because there is not a VP that owns the entire product... It is a hodge-podge bunch of processes based on 1980's technology that anyone refuses to deviate from. The Sun guys have lost such control of their process and environment, that if someone wanted to change a single line in a source file for a driver, you have to recomple the entire operating system source tree (35,000 files) 3,400 makfiles to integrate your change. Almost all of their tools are written in bourne shell and ksh... Basically they have little chance of creating a high quality product and delivering that product to market at the right time at the right price. Enough of HP/Sun... this is a systemic problem in the software industry and is getting worse. Configuration Management is an unknown discipline in Silicon Valley. Ultimately the software companies cannot manage change. I had the pleaure of working on a consulting project for a company that was trying to achieve CMM Level 2. They did... in record time... 14 months. At the same time they had been certified as CMM Level 2, they could not sucessfully compile their product during a 30 day period, install it or test it. Hows that for repeatability. Good marketing though In summary, from the top of the food change CEO, to the bottom of the management food change (1st line managers), there does not exist the domain expertise to manage change. Not a clue! I know I've worked with these guys for 20 years!!! And quality is getting worse not better! Quality is not just bugs, its not being able to deliver what the customer requires. The only revolution is going to come from the customer... not from the inside the industry BP
It is actually a chicken-and-egg problem to see who is at fault, the buyers or the vendors.
Let's start with the buyers, and their proxies, the press. What is the easy way to evaluate software to purchase? Surely not to take the time understand its architecture, algorithms, efficiency of code, etc. and to fully test whether it works in the environment for the intended purpose. No, it is to compare features. So, we got the "Feature List from Hell" and the trade press replete with exhaustive feature comparisons. As if they meant something.
So, as a vendor, to what are you going to build and sell? Of course, you want to be the first to be out there with just enough of each and every feature have the most filled column in the reviews (it barely matters that the features actually work). Sure, you'll also make noise about the rest, but we know it is all Marketicture. E.g., Microsoft has been talking about the benefits of code reuse since the 1980s and implying that Office was more efficient because of common elements, yet StarOffice is about the only suite that actually implements an OO component model.
The article makes an example of Oracle's bad release of 11a, because it was rushed to market. They overlook that this is repeating history -- Oracle almost went out of business in the early 90s because their software was so fundamentally rotten that they had major lawsuits from both customers and shareholders. Obviously, even the industry leaders don't learn. Or maybe they do -- Oracle did it to gain market share, and it worked; at the end of that period, the competitors with better products were fatally wounded, but Oracle "fixed it all" and came back. The lesson is obviously: "it pays screw your customers".
Then, after years of vendors rushing to market and bloating their products with useless bells and whistles that one in 10K people might ever use, and IT managers buying it all uncritically, we then get a new phenomenon.
Consolidation happens, and a few vendors gain market hegemony. Some exploit this by starting to create deliberate incompatibilities. Now, the purchasing decisions get taken out of the IT managers' hands by the business managers. Their primary concern is compatibility -- "I tried to send a critical file over to Bob Jones at our biggest customer and he couldn't open it -- I've had enough of this import/export nonsense, so, damnit, we're standardizing on Microsoft Office for everyone!". In the mid 90s, the major sales forces sold directly to top management; the goal was to go around IT, and it worked.
By not being critical and business-focused in the first place, IT management lost what little power it had. They had become plumbers. Then, they got outsourced to India.
Add to that a collection of bad or self-serving decisions on industry standards, and the mess is compounded. We now have TrueType fonts used broadly, but the more sophisticated Adobe fonts used by the serious graphics experts because John Warnock would not agree to Bill Gate's demand for zero royalties on the fonts shipped with Windows. Or, did you ever have to contend with all the incompatible International character sets and code pages on a variety of browsers and email clients? Everyone talks a good game of international standards, but when it comes right down to it, there is no one standard that is actually used everywhere -- local code is still needed for every locale. And, there are dozens of examples like this.
And, of course, this is all happening in an environment where there the vendors bear no responsibility for their product working. Marketed under "licenses" that would make a pirate blush, they can peddle crap that would generate FTC prosecution for fraud if it wasn't laughed off the shelves first. Do you know anybody that wants any kind of serious device, like a car or a plane, running a PC O
First you cry because the tech boom is over and it's hard to get a job, then you cry because business software is overpriced and it's pumping too much valuable money into tech companies. Make up your mind, people!
Let's make a word processor!
1. Open up your application creator.
2. Drag over your favorite editor component.
3. Drag over your favorite spell checker.
4. Drag over all your other favorite features.
5. Click "Go."
and tada:
One word processor, custom made to your specifications. It only has the features you want and paid for! What a concept!
I agree with what you say, only you are not looking at the big perception picture that usualy comes into play in this misleading 100K+ usd software purchases.
You and your buddy Josh might be better at implementing solution but have have no credibility badge. Most pruchasing companies doesnt know about the bloat nor do they care about it as long as they have support and the certainty you wont dissapear into the night leaving them helpless.
We can have the software with all the features you want.
We can have the software shipped on time.
We can have the software be stable.
Pick one of the above and we can do it for sure. Pick two of the above and there's a good chance it will happen. There is no possible way all three can happen at the same time.
Software is complex.
Documentation is essential for maintaining good systems. This includes documentation internal to the source code and written documentation about what the system does and why. However, The way my previous company implemented CMM was a waste of time. It literally turned a job that would have taken 32 hours (including some good documentation) into an estimate of 240 hours. My theory is that if it takes longer to document than it does to code something isn't right. After all, when something breaks it makes it quicker just to rewrite everything than to read all the documentation.
Here is how to fix the problem:
Get rid of the idiot programmers. Anyone that has worked on a development team in a corporate environment has met them. (I know, this is easier said than done.) At the top of this list are the ones that copy code from a similar function and leave in all of the code that is not relevant to the current function because they don't understand exactly what the code does.
Don't have separate New Development and Maintenance groups. Require that people that build a system maintain it for a period of time. This forces the people with the most knowledge of the system to provide support. Also, as they work maintenance they learn the coding practices that allow this and future systems to be easier to maintain.
Don't overwork the developers or set unrealistic development schedules. As was mentioned in the article: "Don't rush bad software out the door." If someone has not had enough sleep because he just pulled 5 or 6 - 12 hour days he is not going to be very good at programming. People need some mental relaxation. Also, if you force them to work horrid schedules (weekends, holidays) to keep up with an unrealistic release date they are not going to be happy campers and this will also affect the code quality.
When a user asks for some useless feature, instead of adding it explain to them why it won't do anything or how they can accomplish the same thing in the system a different way. This will either A) Keep a useless feature out of the code which will keep the complexity lower, or, B) Lead the user to better explain what he wants to you allowing you to have a greater understanding of what he wants and it gives the programmer a better insight of what needs to be done.
Last, Remember the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid. A programmer's code should be clear and simple. He should realize that someone will have to maintain the code(maybe even himself) and that he should use good programming practices and documentation and not to use some obscure procedure call that no one has ever heard of in order to show off.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
This is what wakes guys like Tom Siebel up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Open source is frightening to the corporate technology world because it allows a small company to have the toolset to compete with the big boys in a way they can't deal with. A small development shop can build the exact solution to a given business problem - not an approximate solution that gets us 90% there and can never bridge the 10% gap.
-- $G
>I know we're talking, but it feels like I'm having an out-of-body experience, and you're looking straight at me.
Of course, it would have taken less time for you, since you guys already knew the codebase, but I digress.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Iâ(TM)m currently working for a Fortune 500 company in the IT department, and the pendulum is swinging from custom development to off-the-shelf packages (including PeopleSoft and a few others that are smaller in scale). Iâ(TM)m a developer, so I have a bit of a biased opinion. That said, there are a few reasons that Iâ(TM)ve seen for the desire for IT middle-management to go for off-the-shelf tech. And, of course, the first reason is because it is seen as easier than custom, in house, dev work. Face it, if youâ(TM)re a middle manager and you have a project that is over schedule and budget, with an internal dev team the blame is with the manager in the team. With an outside vendor, you have many more excuses. Other reasons include lack of knowledge of software dev practices (which leads to the perception that software dev is just too difficult), the preference to deal with a vendor rather than manage a large number of people, and so on.
Iâ(TM)ve certainly seen internal software dev spin out of control here, but Iâ(TM)ve seen the same kind mess with the off-the-shelf software. You pay the base price, then for the consultants to come in and configure it (for weeks or months on end), then you pay for support and upgrades. And you train the users to use a product that often has a difficult to use UI. And retrain them again each upgrade cycle. And, as has been posted already, the users are sometimes forced to adapt the business process to the software, rather than the other way around.
I donâ(TM)t think that everything should always be done in-house. Itâ(TM)s not always advantageous for a company to have to create its own dev and QA team, as well as get good managers who can oversee the project cycle. Especially for software to suite the companyâ(TM)s basic needs, which may not change very quickly. There just needs to be an alternative to these massive enterprise software/consulting companies, many of which seem to center their business model on keeping consultants on the tab for as long as possible.
Luckily, my company was smart enough to say hold the phone before we were totally stuck. We have been trying to migrate from Mainframe to a Client Server environment. As we have been going along, we have discover due to the way the app was written, when a batch payroll job was running, it would completly lock the records it was working on. And since there was one table not just for employees, but for every person in the system whether they were a vendor, a employee or a customer the WHOLE TABLE would be locked and noone else and I do mean noone would be able to use the system. Payroll on the MF also runs in about 2 hours counting the printing of the reports and maybe another 30 min or so for printing the Direct Deposits. Just to run the Direct Deposits, it took 45 minutes(without printing them!)! This job runs in about 5 min or less on the mainframe. Basically, because the batch and even regular lookups were slow as can be, there was not enough time in the day to run all of the batch we'd need to run! Even if everything was done interactively, it would still take forever to do a complete payroll run. Also, we did not install the product on the servers. We just admin it. It was not even installed in a in correct fashion (will the Oracle DB part of it definitely wasn't) and parts of the system used a product which is on the road to being EOL'd by IBM. So, now we are building our case to go back to the company and say you have X amount of time to get things back on track. If you don't, your history and we'll see you in court. What's worse is the company will not admit that thier stuff is faulty and LIES to us about other clients not having any problems when we have picked up the phone and read the internet posts from others having the EXACT same problems we are having. Plus NOTHING follows the correct packaging for the OS so cleaning it up to use for another project will just end up being a reinstall (I guess that isn't too bad since we have to go to AIX 5.1 anyway since 4.3.3 is EOL'd at the end of this year...this is not the prooduct we're worried about with the EOL...it's another). So, our OS company is fine. Our DB company is super. Our software company sucks and we're ready to tell them to go to hell, we'll do it ourselves (and better and in less time).
Gorkman
It saves in "HTML"
7d9e63e9501751ff4bf9307989d5623d *SheepHead
At least Oracle doesn't encourage use of MS Comic Sans (or Bold, Underlined, Italicised Times New Roman)... I hope.
But then a really expensive SQL database which doesn't support NATURAL JOIN rates pretty highly on my "list of things that really annoy me".
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
So you forgot to turn off FindFast. So you forgot to install the GUID patch that causes it to not add your MAC address to all the files you save. So you forgot to unclick the checkbox for the "office assistant" during the MSOffice installation. ...just rename the "actors" directory and clippy will be gone.
It's just THAT EASY!
Corporate IT guys may seem to have the ultimate control over what software is purchased and used. However, having worked in various places I have seen how little control some of these guys actually have.
In one place, the co-owners were in their seventies and relatively comfortable with DOS. Windows was completely foreign to them. What the IT guys wanted and the employees needed to do their jobs was unimportant - Windows was not going to be on any office computer. This was not while Windows 3.1 was new - it was when Windows 95 was giving way to Windows 98.
In another place, the CEO and other execs didn't really know how any of the computer stuff worked -- they just liked the pretty pictures that Windows had. When comparing word-processors the decision went to the most aesthetically pleasing one regardless of bugs or functions.
In most places, only a rare handful of us know how to do more than the minimal functions of the software. When a corporation pays $100K for software functions that will save time, but only 2% of their staff ever learn how to utilize those functions, is it the fault of the software vendor for providing way more functions than will be used and charging for them?
Most of the time when we criticize software as bloatware, we fail to realize that functions we consider critical may be bloat to other users - while their critical functions are bloat to us. The company I work for now has never used any of the outlining functions in MS Word. Think how clean and quick MS Word would be without all that extra code. MS Word includes it even though we don't need it and don't want to pay for it. Why? Because a lot of other companies do use it.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
The article comes across as rather limp, not unlike overcooked pasta. To me, it seems like the author (one Jim Kerstetter) doesn't actually know that much about what he's talking about; he's a regular journalist who is covering a tech story without any decent grounding in the area. To give a few examples:
That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language.... That would be XML
Oracle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison... That would be Larry Ellison
Problem was, it had an estimated 10,000 bugs. Customers balked, and Oracle's application revenues fell 11% by the end of 2002... Wouldn't this be due to the bursting of the Dot-Com Bubble?
Software companies also can turn to quality assurance standards such as the Capability Maturity Model... Anyone who has worked with CMM knows that it is, in reality, Masturbation by Management: temporarily relieving, but an utter willo-the-wisp when it comes to full satisfaction.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"The" business application is a do-it-all monster, like MS Office; and since it must not only do everything but do everything INSIDE everything (like actively linking spreadsheets inside word processing documents, and insane tasks like that), trimming it down is an enormous task.
Maybe the answer is to re-examine software inter-operation and see if these things can be moved further apart. I forget which open-source app was moving towards XMLizing all the data formats, but that's a step in the right direction. Next, in my opinion, will be XMLizing user output formats.
The end result? Application A, instead of having its code intermixed with application B, instead sends the embedded information to it, receives bitmap or vector data as an output, and places it in the user's view. Yes, it's a hell of a lot of added overhead; but the amount added would be worth it, in order to have nice, discrete, stable applications.
It goes back to the old adage that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
I donâ(TM)t think it is simple to fix. Business processes tend to get complicated. Companies must try to meet the needs of many different customers. The end result never looks like something that was designed by one person but rather a conglomeration of the attempts of many people to make everyone happy. You canâ(TM)t just tell your customers to deal with it this way because the programmer doesnâ(TM)t want to spoil the elegance of his system.
You also have to take into account that you rarely if ever get to start from scratch and make everything simple, homogeneous, and elegant. You always end up having to get this file from the old Unisys machine, access this database on the AS/400, ftp this file from another old system, etc. Deal with this Perl script, that COBOL code, that piece of JAVA.
These âoepackagesâ that you implement end up being about 75% code from the vendor and about 25% glue and hacks implemented on-site to meet requirements. So the complexity arises from having to meet all of these needs when a software system is implemented. Each new project adds a few more goofy requirements.
When you start integrating with legacy systems and code from all of the place it is very difficult to adequately test. If you sit down and look at everything it is impossible to develop enough test cases to cover the full range of possibilities. They are practically infinite. Every machine, OS, OS patch level, language, library, communication protocol, file format, database, etc. throws another opportunity for a failure.
You also never have a stable target. Businesses merge, spinoff, develop new products and services, move, layoff, downsize, rightsize⦠At the drop of a hat. When you think about it, we are kicking butt to have anything working.
What exactly do you mean by "slowly"?
We are currently in the process of replacing the system with a new system for a cost rumored to be around two hundred million dollars to the US territory.
The logic goes like this...
- The global management decides to buy an app. for the full organization.
- The global mangement also decides that they are going to charge back the development and liscensing costs to all the territories regardless of whether they use the new system.
- A bean counter in the US says "Why are we paying fifty million dollars for a system we aren't using?"
- No one has the cajones to say, "Global has forced us to through away $50,000,000. Is throughing away another $150,000,000 a good idea?"
Of course, 1 year earlier we couldn't get the $5,000,000 to do a rewrite on a modern Unix platform.Nearly half of your line items are either completel bullshit or hyperbole. How is that funny? If I said the same things about Open Office I'd get a -5 FUD Even if everything I posted was absolutely true!
-5 "crap" for you.
You get all of the object oriented organizational possibilities but none of the Java-induced hardware and middleware bloat. Microsoft's Sharepoint will be there to web-enable the Outlook-centric tasks, but an integrated application set on PHP5 could do the trick just as easily for a fraction of the price. Too bad all of the funding sources dried up last year, or I'd be pitching this idea to the venture capitalists. Hmmm. Money isn't the driving force in software development anyways, maybe I should just go for it. I'm not the first person in line to "build first and ask questions later" but as this story mentions: pretty much nothing sucks worse than business software these days.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Something my company has done since the 80s is write in performance guarantees into the contracts. Sales weasels are always trying to undersell needed capacity, but they want that bottom line percentage worse. So several times we got our contract and when the inevitable performance crisis comes, we got a free mainframe upgrade.
Make the weasels run on YOUR cage wheel.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Well that's why with my software[1] one can pull up a browser (not web) and pick what features they want. CTRL+LEFT BUTTON pulls up a floating menu, with one of the items being "Install". A few brief message dialogs, and BOOM the feature is installed. There can sometimes be a significent lag between install and usage if the feature is a big one (involves quite a few changes), but mostly it's a blip. The rest is "feature managment" on my end as it were. Bill accordingly.
[1] I should point out that a crappy design is a crappy design, and my way doesn't eliminate that obstacle. just makes it a bit harder. You still need smart guys on my end.
In my previous job I was a sales engineer(thats not just a title, i did engineering work/customer support as part of my job, there is a big difference between salesman and sales engineer, most salesmen dont have a technical background,while sales engineers typically worked in the industry). Salesmen work 60-100hours a week, are on the road all the time. They get paid big bucks, but they are the first ones to go during hard times. You think about the job constanly, you don't have weekends because you are traveling to/from the next client, your mind is constantly on work, get called all hours of the day.
Its the hardest most stressfull white collar work I can think off. Your job is on the line because of what you do, TODAY, doesn't matter how much you are sold yesterday.
Clients have no clue what they want, and there are unscrupulous salesmen, but the salesman is there to offer something which they believe will make work easier for the client. (its very difficult to sell something you don't believe it, you can do it, but its just that much harder). Clients will ask for a specific feature, if its not there, sometimes they will not buy.
Its an interesting exciting job, and definatly broadens one's perspective outside the engineering world, which is gennerally pretty isolated from the clients for a reason (do you as a developer want to be pestered every 5 minutes by a client/prospect, probably not, but thats the salesman's job). I no longer work in sales, and now work back in engineering, but not in design (im an electrical engineer at the patent office), but the experience was invaluable.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would.
Reports just to hand indicate that businesses are also starting to notice that many consultants are a waste of time and money.
Join us next week for another edition of "Catching up with the blindingly obvious".
is that I have to blame this once again on Microsoft who seem to add loads of rarely used features to all of their releases of products such as Office. Then they turn around and remove backwards compatibility for those who would choose to stick with older and less (but not much) bloated version. Companies hate to have to upgrade since this costs them valuable capital. But the liscense policies of corporations such as M$ tend to lock them into buying software which bloats larger with each release.
-Cnik
Some solutions are easier to use. For example, building a GUI from a standard set of widgets is dirt simple using Visual Studio. But good design is still hard, and good analysis is even harder. Even assuming that your app doesn't have bugs that crash it, many naive algorithms that work just fine with your sample data don't scale to huge databases or high transaction rates or huge numbers of users.
That doesn't make ease of use bad in itself. However, there is also a very real danger that bosses, customers and users will perceive the project as being done because the GUI looks complete and polished. Joel on Software has a good article on this very problem entitled "The Iceberg Secret, Revealed"
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Anyone who takes the time while reading that to wonder why he excluded women from consideration needs to stop obsessing about sexism and start communicating. It reminds me of the south park about the south park flag* which showed black people being lynched on it. The boys defended the flag... not because they were racist, but because they didn't even thing about the color, it just looked like a bunch of people doing stuff. Think about it, who is really less sexist/racist the person who wants to keep accounting for sex/race in their language/lifestyle/hiring practices. Or the person who just wants to forget about it and treat everyone equally?**
* This episode was in reference to the debate over the mississippi flag, which contains the confederate flag. One side says that it's a tacit endorsement of slavery. The other side says it's a part of history and should be preserved. I say it's a fucking piece of cloth and both sides should just stop whining.
** In case you were wondering, why yes, I am a white male between the ages of 18 and 25.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
> Why not actually hold software companies to the promises they make?
If you don't take the packages at the regular inflated prices without any guarantees, but ask for any sort of guarantee or service level agreement, you're going to pay for it - lots. Very soon, you reach prices like for mil-spec equipment nobody but the military can afford.
And should you be unlucky enough to pay those prices, it won't help you a lot either. In case of non-performance, at best you'll get some of you surcharge back, in the worst case you have the chance of sueing a worthless trading company that folds as soon as you win.
So in the end, discard any dreams of quality and expect to get whatever you see, just like with a used car. Praying that the worst bugs won't hurt you too much and will strike your neighbour instead work well too.
My time recently with a company that bought 15 Microsoft Navision licences has shown me a number of things about so called business software.
Navision has a peculiar interface and is highly dependant on the individual navision partner adapting the interface to your company's needs. Navsion has a number of strengths such as being very simple to install, very fast and fairly robust. But the user interface is limited in that for any given user the interface becomes a mess in a few seconds as the user has to open many tables and masks in order to view and operate on data.
The other big problem with Navision is that the design of the software is a huge mess. The software is divided into tables, forms, reports and code units, and all of these objects can have code in Navision's proprietry C-Side language hidden away that one cannot see (no indication whatsoever) or edit unless one has an expensive developer's licence. There is no IDE to indicate the relationships between the various tables and forms and reports and code editing is done in a notepad kind of environment. Only the visual Tables, forms and reports can be created with a GUI, the rest is all notepad.
What happened in our company is possibly quite widespread. As time goes on the users need more functionality and the Navision partner adds this functionality, but because there is no form of version control or logging, the code becomes more and complicated with time and the Navision partner has to spend more time checking what his own previous code additions actually do. In short it becomes a huge mess, with no one knowing exactly what object does what.
The price tag of around $65000 plus yearly maintenace and licencing for around $20000 do make a good example of how much money actually goes into these applications. The fact that they do not fit all that well into a business's operation without modification mean that there should be some other choice, such as developing these applications with an outsourced custom company. Using OSS software would cut many costs and the company could define the interface and functionality it wants without having to be restricted by absurd licencing.
This should be a real opportunity for all the unemployed OSS people out there.
Then, you force your customers into an ill-fitting "template" that NEVER matches how they do business, charge them six figures for "personalisation" and laugh all the way to the bank.
Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
OK, but who do we call when you and your buddy Josh are off snowboarding? Or when you get bored with programming, and decide to start your own baggy-pants sportswear company? IBM and Oracle will still be in the office working when the snow is good, or in 10 years from now.
Domain specific databases are the answer to this problem. We have to unlink data models from user interfaces and package just the model.
This is my sig.
You seem to confuse _customers_ and _salespeople_. It's the salespeople who scream and want to have it _right now_. Customers don't give a flying fuck about your product before salespeople mislead them into believing that your product does something it realy can't do. Being a PM (and thus by definition collaborating closer with the marketing team than with the dev team) it is important to NOT mix these two groups of people.
Quite the contrary. Believe it or not in the 50s the US auto industry was the envy of the world. GM controlled more than half of the world output in cars during this time. Yes in the 50s people actually believed Cadillac was the best car in the world.
Its not capitalist competition you have in tis market, its undercutting, licensing, sales, lock-in contracts, and everything bu innovation that is going on this market. Why? Because so many pissant players are left over from the 90s that no one in this industry can get traction with new products. No one is making enough money to do R&D. That will change. Peoplesoft, JD, Seibel, etc are all gonzo within two years.
Why would ANYONE in the business world where software was a part of putting food on the table rely in the buggy, unreliable, dangerous world of closed source software to begin with?
if i owned a business, i'd have a dedicated programmer, and have him bug fixing and adding features to whatever open source software already existed.
and if the software screwed up, and cost us productivity or money, he'd be fired/replaced/reprimanded.
As it is the open source software i use is vastly superior to the closed source software:
abiword (why would anyone use ms products? i don't get it!!)
the gimp (yes even on windows)
mozilla (ie sucks, i don't know why ANYONE uses it)
cdex (and yes i use it professionally, i'm a musician)
vlc (i want to watch whatever dvd i buy wherever i buy it)
dscaler (avertv is not nearly as good)
emule beats kazaa, if only more americans would use it! i hate foreign films. lol
"fce ultra", zsnes, 1964. these programs simply rock, guess what: open source.
quake2max, tenebrae, doomsday, for more after hours stuff. All open source.
i use trillian, but that's just for chatting, so who cares? same with winamp.
nero is pretty reliable for me, but i wish there was an open source clone, it would just feel better.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
dictionary.com you doof
Actually, I am allowed near the operating table. I know exactly what's involved, and I speak after years of finding out that a commercial product as a starting point is not nec. any better than starting from scratch. IT DEPENDS ON THE PRODUCT.
My example, of Zope, is a product that DOES have years of commercial development in it, in fact, and your post shows the kind of false thinking that I'm talking about... since it's now distributed GPL, I just must be starting from scratch (after watching a video on business tools) if I use Zope to develop a tool. But clearly you have no idea about Zope, nor any idea what it's really like to put a heavy commercial system in place. It requires a lot of custom configuration and often custom programming to exploit the features, it's not free, the work is not done once the check is signed.
You assume to much.
PS: another thing is, "people and companies"... hmmm, software companies, so a software company gets to tell, say, a beet packing company, exactly how their core functionality should work out. Yes, indeed, they are so wise they should tell you how to do all your business processes should work. What do you know! It's just your business!
The only trouble is that software engineers don't deliver. If they could all deliver to decent standards of quality and timliness then the Beet Company would trust us more. So yes, inexperienced drunks are the problem. Some of them inexperiencedly push OSS, some of them, (yourself included?) push commercial magic bullets, while others of us (me) don't push, but find.
-pyrrho
Here are some quotes from this dufus:
"Marc Benioff, the chief executive of startup Salesforce.com Inc.,...has told anyone who would listen that today's business software is too expensive and too dang complicated. "We have created an industry of complexity and we need to do something about it," he says."
Wal-Mart just informed their top suppliers they must have pallet license plates (RFID's) when Wal-Mart receives their product. Does Salesforce.com support pallet license plates? Or is that some of that "complexity" they left out? Much simpler to just not be a potential major supplier to Wal-Mart, isn't it?
"For starters, give up the "not-built-here" dogma that has kept some software makers from working with new, easy-to-use programming building blocks made by Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM."
The "easy-to-use programming building blocks" from Microsoft is apparently
"That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language, which makes it easier for different kinds of software to work together."
Slow to adopt XML? That's all anybody friggin talks about. The writer is a freakin liar as well. Name me something about XML that is significantly different than a
"Database giant Oracle Corp.'s flubbing of its first all-Internet business software, Oracle 11i, is legendary...Problem was, it had an estimated 10,000 bugs."
From what I read, even with 10,000 bugs it was more stable than some of their earlier client server stuff.
"Although few software execs may actually say it, many agree with Benioff. Software should be delivered as a service over the Internet instead of shipped to customers on a disk."
And your data delivered along with it, one screen at a time? That's ok for contact info, even useful for those on the move. And granted, a server across the internet is much like a server across the local net, but still, not too much complex could be going on with an operation like that.
This is more of the web services along with the browser and XML is a panacea, sort of reminds me of a mainframe in a glass room, replace 3270/5250 with a browser, flat files with XML, FTP with web services, and the glass room with the vendor and we've solved all those nasty software problems! Businesses should just understand, if Larry hasn't provided it for you, you don't need it. I'm sure he must have provided pallet license plates, otherwise Wal-Mart has no business demanding them...
rd
PHB's love to buy "all-in-one" and "easy-to-use" solutions that can be used by morons
Yeah, they may like that, but they could also do a little research before buying. Case in point: I am a compter tech. I fix the little beasts for a living. Many, many, many times, I have customers who've screwed up their systems, not so bad as to not boot, but definately in need of a format and reinstall. They have, many months or years ago, clicked the little helpful button in dial-up networking, or AOL that "remembers" their password for them.. When I ask for their password, they can't remember. Well, there are several programs out there to reveal the passwords hidden by the astericks. Most people who do this for a living have heard of Snadboy's Revelation. Well, it is too big to fit on a floppy (over 1.5MB last I checked) uses Windows installer and requires a reboot before use! I looked around on the Internet for another program to use, as I feel utility programs, especially utilities that are for one specific use, should at the very least fit on a floppy, and in less than three minutes had found a program called OpenPass. It does the same exact thing as SnadBoy, but was only 4KB, did not require installing or rebooting, and was hellaciously fast. Now, the point, OpenPass is also full GUI; one click, and you're done.
How does this relate? Well, OpenPass, in my mind, is much easier to use, does exactly what it says it does, and fits every one of the requirements I have to label it a neccesary tool for my kit. I showed the two to my then boss, and he wanted to buy the Snadboy, as "It uses Windows installer, so doesn't that make it work better?"
As long as people like that are in charge of the purse strings of any company, the software makers will continue to put out pure shit software, glitz up an ad campaign for it, and make gobs of money.
I think it's damn near criminal that companies are run by managers, and marketers.
*flameon* I'd like to see a world where every single business major that came from school, and every single CEO or manager were required to be castrated with no sedation, and forced to live in isolation for a period of 40 years, and then hired and fired in the same day.*flame off* Seriously, anybody in management that's worth a shit, didn't get there intentionally.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
I disagree. Many companies DO know about code bloat and don't realise how affordable or how worthwhile a custom solution really is.
Think about it: you have a set of metadata you REALLY need inserted in every document you have. MS Word, for whatever reason, doesn't have it. So you end up paying people to stick it anywhere they can -- directory stuctures, headers, cover sheets, etc. Eventually, some snake oiler sells you a document storage and revisioning system which contains the small bit of metadata you needed...along with about 10,000 other features. Now, these features have clever names that make your employees want to play with them. In the end, you have a very messed up database and metadata in several different styles...and nothing's uniform, there's no way to search or query and that's all you needed in the first place.
Or you call Das & Josh. We shake and bake some word macros to maintain a document database, and make a little "TSR" style program to watch document directories for name changes. We write a program based on how your people work, collect the data, and put it into a cheap-o SQL database (let's say Postgres cos I love it). Write a couple reports, put your logo and a cute interface on it, and whammo! There's exactly what you wanted.
Support can be outsourced to a big company, if you want it to be. Or you can have the much better support we offer, as evidenced by the list of our happy clients.
Small business is the new generation of software...even IBM knows it, which is why they keep firing so many people. Eventually, small business is all they'll have left!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
So you forgot to install the GUID patch that causes it to not add your MAC address to all the files you save.
Word is putting my MAC address in every file I save?! Holy shit! What else is it doing?
And, what the hell is a GUID patch? Like I "forgot" to install it. Hah. I think that Mocrosoft forgot to produce a reasonable piece of software.
No comment at this time
If companies such as these are littered with MBAs, supposedly trained to recognize and avoid such situations?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
For years I have been wondering why business software hasn't evolved into a set of common building blocks. Business and accounting functions are so standard. Business software packages all do the same basic things: payroll, billing, accounts payable, inventory, order processing, etc. Why isn't there an ANSI standard for doing all these things? Why isn't there a universally used set of business objects by now? Back in the eighties I sort of had hopes that the ISO9000 people might push along these lines, but all they did was insist that every process be documented.
Every company seems to think their situation is unique; off-the-shelf software just doesn't fit the way they do business. But with the high cost of customization and one-off coding, it would really make sense to let software standardization drive business standardization. Maybe it's the same problem that doomed the big push to imitate Japanese business techniques in America. American managers were happy to show a few videos, hand out some pamphlets and say to their employees, "Okay now, go act Japanese." The thing they were reluctant to do was give mere workers the control necessary to accomplish that.
I have a feeling that if somebody wrote a complete, concise standard for business software, managers would hand it to their in-house developers and say, "Go code this, but make sure it lets us keep doing everything the way we do it now."
Probably more to do with the nice lunches and (perhaps) the primo blow-job.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Some years ago, I heard a story about a Siebel Systems account that ended up costing $100 million before it stalled because nobody had any more money to budget for training the end users after the crap was installed.
My immediate reaction was:
1) If Siebel is this incompetent, he should be out of business.
2) If his client was that stupid, they should be out of business.
3) Who authorized $100 million for a software project without budgeting for training end users?
4) I should go to the client and tell them, "Hey! For a fixed fee of $10 million to me personally, I'll solve ALL your software problems!"
It also reminds me of the story in (IIRC ComputerWorld years ago) that Travelers Insurance was suing the Cobol standards people for coming out with a new standard when the company had yet to finish converting from the OLD standard to the LAST standard. This was a company that had a TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MAN COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT WITHIN their IT organization and they couldn't convert their millions and millions of lines of COBOL from one COBOL standard to another in less than something like ten years... My immediate reaction was, "Who is the moron running their IT department - and why isn't it me?"
Management morons...'nuff said...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Actually the company I work for ships CDs. The quality is excellent, although the software it stores is on the buggy side. In fact, I have never heard a customer complain about the quality of the CDs we ship.
Quality is measured in dpm, defective parts per million, not in the "goodness" of the product. Cheap cars tend to be better quality than expensive cars because they have fewer parts.
The software "quality" problem is a design problem that has nothing to do with manufacturing quality at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, in a refreshing move, the higher-ups have decided not to change, conditional on a few minor changes being put into the existing system. Just thought I'd mention for anyone that cares :)
"All ERP solutions suck. And whichever one you choose sucks worst." - the grass is always greener..
SAP, PeopleSoft, Bann...and the list goes on, sure it will all do want you want eventually. Oh, and once you figure it out and get it 'stable', it's time to upgrade. Upgrading can be just as hard as doing the initial installation. If you wait too long between upgrades, the jump in functionality is huge.
I'd love to see an Open-Source alternative to the proprietary (sp?) ERP's. I'm sure it is possible, but these are massive systems. Who's up to the challenge?
Here's a quick PHB ERP spec:
1. Link MM, PS, PP, SD, FI, HR, and Maintenece, in to 1 cohesive software package.
2. Have everything integrated and scalable.
3. Allow for extra Modules to be added at anytime.
4. Make it Global.
Side notes:
Make sure it can handle, Millions of parts, millions of orders, millions of drawings, log all finacial records.
oh, and make it accessible from the Web, anywhere in the world, securely.
End-spec.
This is the overly simplified version, but that's basically ERP. I'm amazed how complex this dang software actually is. Just for Material Management, there's thousands of different setups for parts, and that's not talking about 'configured' parts.
Maybe some day we'll have an OSS solution, but does anyone really have the time to develop it?
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
As much as I agree with you, how long do you think you need to properly evaluate a $100K+ software? How long until you have interfaced it with all your systems and made logic, load, robustness, whatever tests it needs?
Now, from your company point of view, it's maybe OK to spend 2 to 6 months evaluating a software. But for the vendor, there are mouths to feed, unless it's a BIG software company. I've heard in fact of more than a couple of small shops that crashed because of this dilemma in the financial industry (yes, big banks don't always want to fork the $)
Yes, it is doing that. But of course we don't know what else it's doing since the format is proprietary. There was a furor about this some years ago. Supposedly the creator of the 'Melissa virus' was caught because of this. I suggest you look up a program called 'Guideon' which is free and scans through your HDD removing all GUIDs (which contain the MAC address) from your MSOffice documents.
" Word is putting my MAC address in every file I save?! Holy shit! What else is it doing?"
The GUID patch prevents MSOffice programs from putting the GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) that windows creates which contains the MAC address into MSOffice documents. There is a patch (for Office97, at least) that prevents it from adding the string.
Remember, I have no love of MSOffice either and never said that it was a reasonable piece of software ;-)
XML-based open document formats. Without proprietary formats, no one company can corner the market, and innovation can continue. Don't need all of Word's features? Great, write your own software.
And with XML, software that integrates features like version tracking won't interfere with less feature-rich offerings, but they'll still be cross-compatible.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaarrrhhhhhhgggghh...
*SOB*
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Or, it comes in a "package" together with something else.
For example: I have leaded the implementation of a IS that came with a complete set of laboratory equipment. When it came ot choosing the software: There were 2 competitors to choose from. They both deliverd both lab-equipment and software.
Product 1 had good lab equipment and lousy software.
Product 2 had good software, but the lab-equipment was frail and needed a lot of maintenance.
Result: product 1 was chosen. Software bought on the merits of the "whole" product.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
People seem to think that bigger, faster, more configurable, more features are what quality is about.
It isn't, and it's a cultural problem rather than a technical one.
Fitness for purpose is what quality is about but vendors and purchasers both get this wrong. Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance is an interesting read on the subject.
Ironically, one of the reason Unix is still around after 30 years despite everything the Digitals, IBMs and Microsofts of the world have tried is that it is a high quality system. The, do one thing well, mantra is almost the definition of quality.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I was reading the article and thinking "Hell, yeah!" up until I got to the part where they used XML as an example of leaner, more efficient technology that is not being used.
Um, yeah. And all this time I've spent writing DOM applications I somehow mistakenly got the idea that XML was a giant, bloated, overly-complex turd.
If XML is the simpler way, God help us.
once all the necessary functionalities -- or features -- are done, new additions just increase the chances of bugs.
...
This is also true of cars, and PCs, and entertainment systems, and houses, and
Enough already!
I hate to break it to you all but decisions to implement ERP and large business applications are usually a corporate directive. The bigger bucks that push the development houses come from bigger corps that roll it out enterprise. The decision is made by making financial assessments, not technology ones. Usually to cut costs over the whole conglomerate. Exactly what kind of data do you think they are looking at? I put $100 down that they haven't even seen the interface. Migration issues? What's that? Oh you mean like a conversion thing? Therefore NONE of your petty arguments hold any relevence. Show me a CEO/CIO that knows what he's buying (software). Bet you can't count more of them than the fingers that are on your hand.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Because it's not important!
Look, when using a generic term, I don't think it matters all that much, either, but then again I'm also male. Somehow, I have a feeling that if you were in sales and someone referred to you as a "saleswoman" you'd be pissed. Yes, yes, the word shouldn't matter, but the crux of the situation is that words do matter.
So while I don't quite buy into calling my mailman a mailperson (he's a man, so in my mind he's a mailman) I also would never call a woman a mailman (probably just use mail carrier).
Think about it, who is really less sexist/racist the person who wants to keep accounting for sex/race in their language/lifestyle/hiring practices. Or the person who just wants to forget about it and treat everyone equally?**
I've heard this time and time again. The fact is, of course you don't treat all genders/races the same--nobody does. This is not to call you a racist, but to simply keep in mind that race is very much on the minds of the people in our country (I'm assuming that, like me, you're from the US). To bury your head in the sand and insist on a "colorblind" society is bullshit because our society never has, and likely never will be, completely colorblind.
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Point being, it makes a lot of sense for your software to implement the union of everyone's list; otherwise you're just throwing away sales. It is Marketing's job to plumb the customer's mind for feature requests, and find out which ones are common enough to warrant inclusion. Sales' job is to educate potential customers as to what you offer, and in particular things the customer does need and might not have thought of yet (that is, things on your feature checklist that ain't on the competitor's list, heh heh).
How well-designed the product is under the hood is entirely irrelevant to the customer, as long as it meets minimal standards of data integrity and not crashing.
And believe me
Before you flame me, please listen... I'm writing some database processing software for a layman manager in a huge Venture Capital/adverising firm. Using Microsoft Access I've created software in 7 days that has rollover buttons, inline help, and calls DLLs for high seed processing of large datasets. I've had days where I've rolled out more than 3 minor revisions of the software to the customer, with their feedback each time. RAD is here to stay, but I feel bad that I'm taking the job of 50 C++ programmers away that would be needed to provide this speed of service.
I know C++ but unfortunately in these days of RAD, C++ is too low-level (almost as low-level as C). Shell and Perl scripts are good for automated admin tasks, but don't serve any purpose to PHBs. The unfortunate fact of the matter is the high rollering PHBs are dumb and impatient with computers, and aren't willing to wait longer than a few hours for new software to meet business needs.
Of course, if the software actually runs the business this can be differrent (like JSP on www.expedia.com). The fact of the matter is that all the PHBs ever wanted from C++ was nice graphs, some data storage, and simple reports to pad out some powerpoint presentation that everybody will fall asleep in.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
My company (Fortune whatever blah,blah,blah) had been working happily with NT4/Office97.
As we all know, those are not being supported anymore by its manufacturer. Thus we were forced to upgrade (not really, but there are some people still lacking the guts to trust that their employees are not dumb and to explore options that exist out there).
We upgraded to W2K btw (I don't know why, although I presume licensing was the main issue).
SO as you can see, the consideration for bells and whistles was far in our priority list, we assumed the applications are good enough and then some people cover their @sses by ensuring commercial support from a known (I did not say reputable) manufacturer.
At home it is even worse. For people that are not computer literate there is no choice: new PC equals new software, no matter you want it or not and that you have perfectly valid licenses for working software.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not necessarily exact information, but at least ballpark information to find out if it would fit into the budget.
The ones that didn't have the pricing info on the site never found their way into my research report.
I've been doing journalism the last few years, often with the same kind of hours.
Guess what doesn't make it into my articles?
Somehow, I feel that my employers, clients, and readers haven't missed a damn thing with respect to the companies that wasted my time often frantically looking for info on their site because they figured that I needed a salesperson pressuring me along with the pricing info I actually wanted. Companies willing to waste the time of people checking their sites and their salespeople's time on non-qualified buyers simply aren't worth the hassle of dealing with.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I've worked in software consulting my whole career and one of the gripes I've had with it for a long time is the salespeople promise more than can be delivered at a price the customer finds attractive. When you're dealing with a competitive bid process, this seems to always be the case. Since the people they're negotiating with don't understand computers or software completely, not to mention the software development process, the only concrete criteria they have to go on is price and time of delivery. And that's what the salespeople focus on.
Unfortunately this leads to projects that either don't get done because the staff is overworked as it is, before the new project comes along (though I'm a bit doubtfull this is happening these days), or the staff ends up working overtime and weekends to get it done on time, sometimes leading to burnout.
What I've noticed with custom software projects, particularly when they're started from scratch, is they always go over budget. Most projects of this kind are fixed-bid, meaning that the customer pays a lump sum for initial development, and that's all the consulting company gets, until the project gets to a level that is to the customer's satisfaction. Once the customer signs off on it, the maintenance portion of the contract generally kicks in. Given the condition I describe above, this always seems to work to the consulting firm's disadvantage, and creates lots of pressure to get the project done any way you can, even if the code looks like total crap and you would pity the poor soul who has to maintain it after you. My experience has been that so long as the program works, the customer doesn't care about anything else. If one person says they can get it done in a week, and another says they can get it done in a month (for more money), they're going to pick the one who said they could get it done in a week (for less) every time.
What gets me is the complaining about software quality from the customers as though it's all the software providers' fault. I realize the addage that "the customer is always right", but I don't think customers realize they are a part of their own problem, due to their lack of understanding about how the software industry works. I think we'd all be perfectly willing to deliver high quality software, but if I had the opportunity to talk to a customer directly who was wondering how to get it, I'd say, "Don't just jump at the lowest bid you can get. Educate yourself on the best practices in the industry and ask your candidate providers if they're using them. You also need to understand that software development is not a foolproof science. The best results come from taking an extensive amount of time to plan out what you want the software to do as early in the process as possible, and then allow plenty of time at the end of the project for testing and refinement. This leads to much less headaches later on."
I agree with the article's assertion that software providers need to get away from the "not created here" attitude, and be more willing to buy components that can do some of the work for them, to help the project move along more quickly without sacrificing quality. I worked for a firm that had this attitude, and we wrote quite a bit of our own software, which caused projects to run on longer (always past the deadline and overbudget too, to the provider's detriment). Had we bought off-the-shelf components to augment our efforts I'm sure we could've gotten done faster, and spent less money. Organizations often make the erroneous conclusion that because a component or subsystem costs hundreds of dollars, "It's too expensive, we'll just develop it ourselves." Nevermind that paying your developers to do it costs thousands of dollars!
Granted components are not a panacea. The intelligent buyer needs to evaluate them to make sure they aren't buggy, before using them, but it's difficult to argue that this would take more time than developing the same parts in-house.
It's fine for customers to demand better quality, but I think they need to understand what goes into making a better quality product. The one that has the lowest price is not necessarily it.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"