[gcanyon]

I'll never forget when I was at HBO in the '90s (large Oracle shop at the time) and we were trying to figure out an Oracle product. I wasn't core to the effort; I was just trying to help, since the people smarter than I was were completely stuck.

So I asked for the install cd. I figured I could install the product in question (Oracle Forms? It's been too long and I barely remember) and poke around, and maybe a beginner's eyes would see something the masters missed.

I stuck the cd in my computer and clicked the installer. It asked which install file I wanted to execute. There's more than one? Yep, several. And not all in one folder, clearly labeled. They were in several different places on the cd, and named things like x39usethis21 and yz2nousethis982. It was a completely garbage experience.

And to be clear, this wasn't some hand-crafted one-off. This was a silk-screened, mass-produced, official Oracle product.

So I went to the documentation, also on the cd. It wasn't in text files, or even standard html files -- there was a special documentation reader application, because of course there was -- even though the files were obviously (nearly) standard html. And again, the documentation app wanted to know what file to start with, and the doc files weren't well organized, and didn't have an obvious starting place. So I opened the most likely candidate, which turned out to not be the documentation root. But it did have a menu of links, and there was one that was labeled "index" or "start here" or something.

I clicked the link and got a 404. Double-check: yes, it's pointing to a location on the cd, just not one where there's a file.

There's more to the story, but the above pattern continued throughout. And the experts never got the tool to work, after months of trying, with Oracle consulting on speed-dial.

This confirmed what I've described since the '80s as Canyon's Law of Inverse Usability: the price of a product and the usability of that product tend to correlate inversely.

[jonathankoren]

I also discovered that law. Sometimes I’ve even declared, “This software really sucks. We must be paying $200,000 a year for this.”

[gcanyon]

Yep. I first realized this in the '80s when I was working in FileMaker Plus (from Nashoba at the time) to import data and print out bulk mail. FMP was WYSIWYG -- easy layout tools, and I could make anything I wanted happen in seconds with a ~$2800 Mac 512k and a ~$7000 laserwriter.

One time we had a job that required a high-speed printer, so we went to a copy shop. They had a ~$300K Xerox printer that was the size of three washing machines side by side. It could print something like 20-30 pages per minute compared to the laserwriter's 2(?).

And the Xerox had something like a 4-inch amber-and-black display, and the guy setting up the job was putting in parameters by hand, almost like writing code to do the layout. He spent a minute doing that, hit the button, the machine spun up, and then BOOM, out came a page. And the layout was wrong.

He spent 20 minutes getting the layout right, through maybe 10 iterations of write code, spit out a copy, see that it was wrong.

And that's when it hit me: with a machine that expensive, you want it working non-stop. Time spent on setup is time wasted, clearly. And yet no one at Xerox was thinking about that, obviously, because that thing couldn't have wasted more of its time on setup if they'd tried.

And on the other hand, the (relatively) cheap Mac+LaserWriter had WYSIWYG and was ready the first time, every time. It was insane the difference between the two.

[cdme]

It's still a thing with Oracle. I worked at a large music retailer running on ATG/Oracle commerce and I don't think I ever saw documentation on how any of it worked.

The folks on the backend had it running and, if they were out, you were SOL. It was 7+ sites running out of a ~10 year old code base with an alarming amount of technical debt. I'm sure it wasn't cheap.