[evancoop]

When a private citizen buys software, the question is "does it do enough, for the price, for me to buy it?"

When an enterprise procurement office buys software, the question is "is there anything it does NOT do that will cause someone to fire me for having purchased it ?"

[treis]

I don't know that's necessarily the cause, but if you've ever seen an RFP for enterprise software it's obvious why bloat happens. There's hundreds of does it do X, does it do Y... questions. And in order to win the bid you have to answer yes. Even if it doesn't make a lick of sense.

Like I worked on a big server side Java application and when offline became a thing one of the questions was "Does it support offline usage?". Obviously, since it's a gigantic Java server side application, the answer should be no. And there's no reason that a customer should want to run it or any application like it offline. But the question is there and if you answer "no" then you don't get the sale. So they built some half assed terrible bit of offline functionality that no one in their right mind should ever use. Now they can answer "yes" to the dumb question and get more sales.

[Scarblac]

And as someone else mentioned, it often doesn't go through procurement - there is yet another merger or acquisition, and now you support two incompatible piles of enterprise software.