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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

Enterprise software is a sub-class of business software. Enterprises often operate quite differently from SMBs. Public US companies will have things like SOX compliance. And, the enterprises offering up services, like email, may be competitors in another space. If you are competing with Google on phones do you want them to host your email? Likely not.

The business world is complex.

Some complex business software is fantastic. For example Excel. It's complex but you can do amazing things with data without learning to program (which is most people). You can use it while being on or off the Internet (this is great on a plane).

For UX many have given up security features. Many of us now have free credit monitoring because that lack of security has lead to leaks everywhere. I know people who have had their identity stolen and even attacks on retirement funds all due to companies lacking in security. Our drive for the new shiny has left many vulnerable.

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> For UX many have given up security features. Many of us now have free credit monitoring because that lack of security has lead to leaks everywhere. I know people who have had their identity stolen and even attacks on retirement funds all due to companies lacking in security. Our drive for the new shiny has left many vulnerable.

I would lay money that far more security vulnerabilities are due to overcomplicated customizability features than are due to simplified UX.

I would argue it's more complicated than that. In my experience, especially I started working for some enterprises, the people who make the complex software are also the ones putting in the time and care into security. It's not a causation but there is something to be said about culture.

Excel is programming, it just doesn’t call itself that so people won’t get scared off.

It doesnt have to be though, its also a great whiteboard for brainstorming and mindmapping. It works for things besides numbers and functions.

Sure people could use notepad, onenote, powerpoint, other proprietary software, but they are comfortable in the grid like ridgularity of excel.

I wanted to do everything in Excel lately, but it (at least 2013 that I'm stuck with) seems to be a horrible frankensteinian mishmash of features that don't work together. For instance, there almost seems to be the infrastructure for building a virtual database in a spreadsheet, but there are a million different things that trip you up, like the not-quite-integration of PowerPivot, the use of DAX instead of SQL, the missing VBA interface for crucial things. I still don't know why you can use OData from Excel, but then you add something to the data model and try to get to it from PowerPivot, and you don't have permissions for the exact same URL and then the whole thing gets corrupted.

Within Office, it seems more practical to do ambitious things with Access, although that has its issues too. I apparently completely corrupted a database I've been using just by pasting part of a SQL statement that was >= 1024 characters as part of a VBA script.

Another big gotcha that hits large public organizations is that the software must be ADA compliant. This is extremely difficult and expensive to meet. Most small vendors do not meet the minimum requirements or even consider doing so.

I got to be a fly on the wall in an organization meeting where we realized our third-party UI vendor had no roadmap for internationalization.

That was an uncomfortable day. ;)

Heh, I know of a major health record software that can’t handle time zones. So the hospital system has its instances sharded that way.

Once you cross a time zone, your records are much harder to access.

Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour?

There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.

No, but it is an interesting problem. If something is done every 4 hours at standard times, do you shift all standard times by an hour so it’s still every 4 hours or have a gap of 3 or 5 hours for that task.

I kinda like the idea of regular scheduled downtimes of stable systems, just for real experience on downtime procedures.

Interestingly it is rather straightforward to meet. It is very difficult to prove compliance. Most sites with web front ends should be ada/508 compliant, but documenting it is similar to other paperwork exercises (iso9000) that cost a lot but have little real impact.

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