[doublescoop]

ERP systems like Netsuite may or may not be good, but a huge portion of the bad experiences most users have with them has to do with configuration rather than the system itself.

There's an argument to be made that great systems can't be misconfigured, but the "everything and the kitchen sink" attitudes most of these business back-end systems are built with isn't really conducive to opinionated expertise driving product design.

[thwarted]

I had this experience with Salesforce. People without any actual software creation/maintenance or system administration experience having administrator rights in Salesforce ends up being a mess and a nightmare. Data hygiene ends up terrible, because you can add any fields you want anywhere, you end up with fields named customer, customerid, customername, customer_name, cust, custid, with none of them being canonical, or validated, of different types. And people end up having put a bunch of data in a field named "cutsomer", with a misspelling that everyone just accepts.

I'm not a big fan of Salesforce in general (did they add, uh, XREF support in validators yet? Sorry, I'm forgetting the terms) but I do think it gets a bad rap mainly because a bunch of non-technical people are often tasked with setting it up and there's no discipline in it's configuration or use. It can be made to work reasonably well, but it rarely gets to that point.