You rarely hear of big VC money going after a tech company who makes software for businesses. Most of the new you hear is about Wesabe or SmugMug or Snooth or YouTube or any other web site/application that consumers use. And probably because most enterprise software sucks.
Vinh from Subtraction says,
This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users.
In the CU space, I instantly think of core processors. They all suck. They are written upside and backwards, using outdated technology that cannot scale to meet today’s demands. And I think the concept of UI design and end user experience is completely lost on them. The 37Signals response says it the best, "the end users aren’t the buyers."
These two images do a great job of visualizing what I see core processors facing and why they are going to fail at creating enterprise software that doesn’t suck.
Thanks Creating Passionate Users for the pictures.
2 comments for this entry ↓
1 Nathan Demous // Dec 19, 2007 at 5:49 am
I would say the reason core systems are not getting good feedback is the lack of experience outside the CU world that most CU employees have. I work IT for a CU, and I can count on one hand the other CU IT staff I have met who have experience in IT outside of CUs. Most don’t know anything about what is happening in the IT world outside of their own small experience. Innovation won’t happen with our core developers until we ask for, and we won’t know what to ask for until we get our heads out of the CU box.
2 Daniel Shelby // Dec 28, 2007 at 8:22 am
Some of the software houses that develop these core systems also have “the good ol’ boy” club going on and will not listen to any suggestions from the lowly end users.
Leave a Comment