[exelius]

You also end up with a mess of VBScript code that isn't versioned. When something breaks and someone calls IT, it really helps if IT knows the system exists.

In a large organization, supporting disjointed business processes (or worse, fragile amateurish integrations) costs more than the software. At scale, consistency matters more than performance variance in some areas.

Access is also a nightmare from a security standpoint. AFAIK that's why it was abandoned; there was no way to keep the functionality and easy defaults that users liked while making it secure. It scares companies shitless to have critical financial data sitting in Access databases...

[vram22]

>You also end up with a mess of VBScript code that isn't versioned. When something breaks and someone calls IT, it really helps if IT knows the system exists.

This is one reason why (I guess) largish companies even have or create apps to manage other apps - like an app to manage (as in know about, not really manage as in monitor) all the other apps in the company. Like a list of apps app. Initially I wondered whether it was overkill but later realized that at that scale, such automation can be useful. But I guess it can go to the other extreme too and become a time sink.

[crispyambulance]

Yeah, but these things exist because they started as experiments which did not warrant getting a team of developers to burn through a million dollars for the first version.

Its really hard to know, in advance, which internal applications are worthy of a development team. As for nightmares... there's plenty to go around for everyone. Some of the worst nightmares are created by large teams of highly paid and skilled developers.

[scandox]

> Some of the worst nightmares are created by large teams of highly paid and skilled developers.

Sticking that above my desk