[rjempson]

I don't really get your point. Its obvious that game developers would produce better interfaces / experiences, because that is what they are selling.

Enterprises are selling a product or service, and the customer paying the bills doesn't see the internal software that facilitates some part of the process of delivering that product or service. You could dream up a few examples where the end customer might be impacted by a poor UI used by internal staff but it would be an edge case.

If every enterprise software project attempted to produce game quality interfaces and experiences to the user, the costs would explode.

The only benefits of producing better interfaces / experiences / workflows for an enterprise are user moral and user efficiency. The latter is quite often addressed in my experience, as it affects the bottom line.

[ucee054]

You were shooting down the article by disparaging web and app developers, claiming that entreprise apps were ooh so haaaaard, implying that they required lots of expertise to build. Bullshit. In actual fact, entreprise software can be little more than a trivial skin over a database, with a sprinkle of domain logic.

The games example was just to show something that is really hard. I don't need the UI to be game quality; I'll settle for just the same quality as Excel.

And by the way, there is some unusable entreprise software out there. You seem unconcerned with the unhappiness its piss-poor UI causes for users so long as it's "efficient".

Take a look at Lotus Notes and tell me just how "efficient" it is.

[rjempson]

I think this comment is even more naive than the game UI comment. Excel has one of most complex UIs in existence. I seem to recall reading once there are many 100s of developers on that team.

[ucee054]

What the hell relevance does this have?

There were hundreds of developers at Siebel. There were hundreds of developers at Peoplesoft. There are hundreds of developers at Sungard. There are hundreds of developers at Oracle. There are hundreds of developers at SAP.

The difference is, unlike (in increasing order) Microsoft, Apple or Nintendo those companies don't give a shit and produce a crappy product.

Now stop changing the goalposts. You claimed that the SAAS people were whining, that they were no good, and that their stuff was easy to do, and that's why they were wrong to complain about the shitty state of entreprise software.

I showed that your claim against the SAAS people was ad-hom, and showed how entreprise software was way worse than what your average four year old has access to.

You moved the goalposts, and claimed that doesn't count because the games people are in the business of experience. So I came up with Excel, which is in the business of business, and which basically runs Wall Street. (There are many other examples, that easily trounce "entreprise" software. MS SQL is one of them.)

Now you're moving the goalposts again, to say why Excel doesn't count. It would be far more honest for you to just admit that the SAAS people are right, and that entreprise software sucks.

And it's for no other reason than that the vendors are cheap bastards who care about nothing other than making a buck.

They don't want to put the effort in to make entreprise software any good because it would cost a lot and hence lower their margins. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.

[devdas]

For what problem domain? There are very few players in the corporate knowledge management ecosystem, none of which is particularly easy to use, but all of which are pretty powerful at that complex task.

[ucee054]

For what problem domain?

For using it at all without tearing your hair out