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Ironically, this is a part of how some actually decent, large software companies that you'd think could afford the BS overhead and broaden out their revenue streams by using the partners. Google, for example, has a number of enterprise integrators that deal with the terrible BS of anything related to organizations that spend more time trying to figure out what to do than actually doing anything.


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Not to mention that companies like Google and Microsoft also offer different levels of technical support alongside their products.

For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).


Respectfully, I don't think you appreciate the scale of huge companies and the requirements for the software and suppliers that help to manage them.

If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the problem until it was solved. They might not even bother to market the result publicly, to avoid diluting their brand, but if they chose to do so, then the unfortunate small company concerned would probably be gone in a few months (assuming the large company didn't just litigate it out of existence because it was easier, if you're in a jurisdiction like the US).

Put another way, companies like Dropbox don't do well because they have a magic recipe that the big boys don't, they do well because they've chosen a niche where they're too small for the big boys to care about and where there are plenty of smaller businesses who will value and pay for that kind of offering because they don't have the same kind of resources in-house to do it themselves.

Edit... I should also mention Google, who aren't likely to be competing in the "enterprise" arena any time soon for a very different reason: they aren't set up to support that scale of customer. If you want to sell software to an engineering giant or a global services firm with an employee count in six figures, you don't show up with a few web pages and an e-mail address, you send a CxO or two on a plane to their head office to schmooze them, and then you appoint an SVP whose only role is to lead a large team of sales and support staff dedicated to jumping when that customer says jump.


Ha, sounds a lot like most big companies. Why get and train competent staff to build a software development process when you can pay 10x as much to a vendor for software that doesn't really work.

This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you the number of companies that exist just building a simple application that does the one thing customers bought these bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about every cloud company.

Also, enterprise sales usually are corrupt, big contracts mean to throw moneay at the people in charge of the decission.

Another point, is that usually each company have diferent processes, and it's quite difficult to make a one-size-fits-all (as in facebook/twitter/google). Intranets, and biz software usually need people to make custom modifications on each company. Usually the people in charge of this changes are not as competent as the ones who write mainstream software and you end with a lot of crap, which is almost impossible to stop due to the fact that there are very few good programmers around to make custom changes to every company in the world.


Large organizations are made of "money saving entities".

I work with a lot of large corporations and we have constant problems with the software I support because the imperative is to continually drop operational costs. We'll have a team we work with that is well trained, understand the software well, and keeps the software working at near 100% capacity.

Then suddenly one day they are all gone and you get the offshoring team that knows nothing about the specialist software they are attempting to support, if they have the capability to actually turn a computer on is surprising. Software availability drops significantly having direct impact on deliveries, costing god knows how much in some of these companies. Support on the vendor side (my side) turns into a huge expensive mess because now you're now writing instructions to the level of "when you take a poopy, remember to flush and pull your pants back up".


> If they are distributing through enterprise than they would be hauled in to the office to fix it.

Because big companies never, ever get by on annoying, but functional software?


I mean, that's fine, though, right? If they don't have the headcount to sell support contracts, and that's not the kind of company they want to build, that's their choice. I sympathize; running a company like that doesn't sound particularly pleasant. You quickly lose focus on building the actual technology and spend too much time on enterprise sales. And if they don't want to give away their software under terms that let people put it behind a web service without releasing changes, that's also their choice.

I guess it's an industry-wide problem. It would be illuminating to learn of any counter examples, where a big software company manages NOT to fall into this trap.

They're of the same ilk as Oracle/SAP.

They need to absorb things so their sales team can say "oh we have X feature" regardless of its actual implementability and just leave it to the consultants to struggle and somehow implement a half baked solution that doesn't work in the end.

Oh but that's how they make money also. More products, more features, more crappy integrations = more service contracts, more consulting work, etc.

All a huge scam that enterprises are forced into because they don't want to be "left behind in the digital economy."


Helping to ensure the stability and continued evolution of the software the company depends on? I don't see how this is such a difficult concept for some to understand.

Its not the software. Its the outsourcing stupid.

The extra cost to produce high-quality software is not offset by higher profits from that software. If low-quality software generates 90% of the revenue for 30% of the cost, why bother with that extra work? It makes sense from the management's perspective, however frustrating it is from the user's end.

I face the same thing. I'm locked into using a particular GIS software package for my work, supposedly a central system accessible from any device. However, in practice they have 3 different apps and 2 different web interfaces, none of which have the same feature set. And often I want to use data that's accessible on one of their platforms to do processing that's only available on another of their platforms. And there are backend problems for which I've periodically been sending in support/suggestion tickets for a decade without any fixes. However, their marketing feeds are constantly bragging about new features and integrations. Why? Fixing their broken shit is harder work for less payoff. So they just don't. And they've got the patents, so they don't have to care.


The reality is that most companies have people manually working around the limitations of the software they are using. Without them the company would not function.

long term, companies that operate like this are better off paying for third party services that handle the more technical details that they aren't interested in managing. these are the target customers for managed infra services like heroku, fly, and such (or more task-specific services like pack digital). imo if you get into heavy technical requirements territory, the leadership has to re-assess their priorities or risk drowning the org in tech debt.

Huge enterprises are often made up of thousands of sub-domains with relative freedom to choose different technology.

It's actually useful to remember if you're a start-up chasing a contract with an enterprise. You might bend over backward accommodating BigCo to get their name on your books thinking you'll make it huge once "they" start using your technology only to find it never actually gets further than 2 people in Sub-Department-Offshoot, and while you might get to use that fancy logo on your marketing material, you'll wonder if the concessions and vastly undercharged overwork was really worth it because the payday of actually having BigCo use your tech throughout their stack never materialised (because it never really does, but it'll be endlessly dangled in front of you to get you to agree to put in a bunch of features for free).


Especially when the established players:

1. Have huge bloated software that is hard to add features to, support, or reason about

2. Are based on a decade or more old software (at best)

3. Are being undercut by software that does probably less than 10% of what they offer, because nobody needs the other 90% of shit they pack in (but did because they added some customization or "feature" to the product whenever a big client came online due to some slimy sales guy)


I've never met a software vendor in this space that has a freaking clue what they're getting into when they sign these contracts. They never think about interoperability despite signing on to the requirements, they assume too much when it comes to their customers defining requirements, and hate offering up the goods to work with other systems you have in place (but can usually be twisted to offer bare minimum integration).

I'm not following why it makes no sense? Just like the guy above me said, it's smart to provide the full services: Help build, deploy, update, and sell software.

Having deep integration generally makes for a smoother process.

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