[cheschire]

Just guessing, but I suspect this is because most software is designed to extract some minimum acceptable investment per person from maximum people, and simply focus on scaling.

When software is designed to focus on extracting maximum investment per person, and focus on whaling vs scaling, then you get loot boxes. Suddenly overall software quality matters a whole lot to the user base.

[pjc50]

> whaling vs scaling

This is a great phrase that I'll have to remember. Pretty much all enterprise sales is "whaling".

[andruby]

And yet, what I see is that enterprise software seems much less polished than consumer software.

My assumption is also that enterprise software contains _more_ bugs than consumer software.

[cheschire]

That's probably why articles like this get written so often. The companies who create enterprise software seem to think they're still working on scale.

And I don't intend my loot box reference to be taken too seriously. The gaming industry isn't any better. As an obvious example, Cyberpunk 2077 was delivered as a hot mess only to meet overhyped timelines.

But look at games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, etc. They work very diligently to ensure the core gameplay is solid so streamers will provide eyeballs, driving lootbox sales. Whales provide the biggest investments there, with some individuals spending thousands of dollars for cosmetic lootboxes in what would otherwise be a free game.

Then look at games like Quake Champions which should've been successful in the same way, and completely failed because they didn't focus on making the core game tech (net code specifically) rock solid before attempting to monetize. They immediately lost the pro crowd and failed to convert the people playing Quake Live (or even the die hard Q3A players).

Enterprise software often doesn't spend enough time improving core process loops, or worse, provides too many core loops making the experience disjointed and unproductive.

[pjc50]

Yes, the "whale" is the single huge client who pays a lot of money for the enterprise software. The client is not the users. The sales pitch for enterprise software is where the polish goes.

[hef19898]

For Enterprise software I take auditable, stable processes and performance over a polished UI every single time. Also talking as a long time user of the poster child, SAP. Enterprise software doesn't have to be pretty, it has to do its job. And that requires a lot effort, I'd argue more effort than developing a polished consumer facing app.

[crucialfelix]

I am guessing it has to do with the style of product managers in enterprise. A lot more non-technical PMs, people with BI backgrounds?