Pylimitics

I’ve noticed something over the past few years about the software I use at work. I’m referring to commercial stuff like Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and the lot, “collaboration tools” like SharePoint, as well as more niche things that are more unique to the company I work for (which is a large enterprise). What I’ve noticed is that it all, invariably, is at best unpleasant and at worst absurdly complicated to use. Some of it is borderline impossible.

This certainly isn’t inevitable. I use plenty of software outside of work, often to do very similar things. The difference is that the software tools I use outside of work are not “enterprise” software; they’re designed for individuals. I buy these things myself, or in the case of some things from Apple, they came with my MacBook Air and iPhone.

It’s not that software can’t be designed to work smoothly and easily. And it’s just silly to argue that the companies creating enterprise software don’t know how to do it better. There’s certainly no secret to doing that. And in the past, at least some of the companies that are now selling badly-designed software used to design it better — in some cases, the exact same products. Microsoft Word, I would argue, was a better, more productive, easier-to-use tool ten and twenty years ago than it is today. I don’t have any hard data to back that up; I just remember being quite pleased when I used Word version something-or-other back then. I’m certainly not pleased when I use the current version.

So if enterprise software vendors do know how to build better software products, but they’re consistently going in the opposite direction, the answer must be that these tools are getting worse and harder to use on purpose.

I think that’s what’s going on. The obvious question is “why would they make their own products worse?” I think the answer lies in the business model of the software companies themselves.

Modern public corporations are wedded to the idea of “shareholder value.” This notion gets tossed around as if it’s a built-in aspect of capitalism, but it’s not; in fact it’s fairly recent, historically speaking. It comes from about 1970, when Milton Friedman wrote, in the New York Times, an editorial titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. You can still read it: vhttps://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

If you think your corporation exists to “increase shareholder value,” you have to keep your stock price going up. That basically means your corporation has to grow. And keep growing, forever. This is obviously impossible, but capitalists seem to be quite prepared to ignore that, and focus only on the next three months — “the quarter.”

Big software companies are for the most part public corporations, and like nearly all of them, have internalized the idea of shareholder value. That means they have to keep growing. The obvious way to keep your corporation growing is to find more paying customers. But virtually all the companies in the economy, public or not, have already bought enterprise software, from Microsoft Word to SalesForce…um, whatever it is that SalesForce does (nobody really seems to know, but that’s a separate issue). Finding new customers is very, very difficult, and has been that way for years now. So maybe you can sell something new to your existing customers. “Something new” can take a long time to come up with if you have to design and produce a whole new product — and a product that does something new that the enterprise software you already sold your customers doesn’t do. That’s hard too. One other alternative is to sell your customers extra services. You know, like training. Your customers will need more training in a couple of cases: when the software you sold them is very difficult to use, and when you regularly issue new versions that introduce new ways to use functions they’ve already had — sometimes for years.

Remember when Microsoft introduced “the ribbon?” There wasn’t anything new on the ribbon; it was just a different way to do the same stuff you could already do. But it was different, and I’ll bet Microsoft offered new training. And the smaller companies that make their living off of Microsoft products offered training too. That lasted for a while, and after that, there are always more old functions to move around, and sometimes even new features to introduce. As a result, enterprise software companies almost always (maybe always; I haven’t checked every single one) have training divisions, and even “professional services” divisions to help their customers do things that the vendor’s own software is designed to make so difficult that only the vendor itself can really do it.

There’s a lot of money in corporate training.

But it’s all in service of keeping the tools so many people use every day more difficult and complicated to use than it could be. And who’s keeping any accounting of the frustration, annoyance, and disillusionment engendered by being forced to use shitty tools that you know, as a practitioner, could be so much better? When a significant portion of your life involves frustration, annoyance, and disillusionment, that’s not just a decline in software quality; it’s a decline in our lives.