Red Hat CEO Says Software Vendor Model Is Broken 223
alphadogg writes "The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems. 'The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.' Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about $1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that 'easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year,' he said."
No Shit (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, who the fuck didn't know?
Cloud will kill the model (Score:4, Interesting)
""People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation. Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.
That ease in the cost of deployment, coupled with the flexible infrastructure the cloud supplies, will eventually mean the death of the traditional "per-proc" style of enterprise licensing. Happily, it likely means fantastic opportunities for open-source to take back a large share of the market. I've spent the last year migrating my medium-sized enterprise to the cloud AND a near-100% opensource infrastructure. In my particular sector (healthcare) that's becoming a trend - it's not a coincidence that the move within the medium to medium-large enterprise to the cloud often goes hand-in-hand with a serious investigation of open-source software within the mission-critical, production infrastructure.
Maybe. (Score:3, Insightful)
But from his original statement:
That's because as it because possible to do more in X hours ... more is demanded by management.
As more space becomes available, more data is stored. Older data is not discarded.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of enterprise licensing costs. Costs are calculated per cpu or per seat because that's a convenient proxy for the size of the system, not because of any actual deployment expenses associated with the number of cpus or seats. If you think your licensing price is going to magically head downward because of cloud computing, you are in for a nasty shock. Instead prices will head up because the cloud providers now have more lock-in. In any case, the lice
Waste is what drives the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like war, commuting and other essentially completely worthless phenomena, waste of programmer time makes money exchange hands, and therefore increases GNP.
In this case: who would want to be the first to go out on a limb publically and say "I want to decrease the IT sector by 50%"?
Don't blame me, I didn't design that stupid measure.
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uh... exchanging money does not necessarily increase GNP.
Actually it does:
A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product (GDP), gross national product (GNP), and net national income (NNI).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measures_of_national_income_and_output [wikipedia.org]
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Actually it does
Actually, it doesn't. You need to read Wikipedia on the calculation of GDP [wikipedia.org] more carefully. GDP is the sum of final consumption expenditure, gross capital formation, and net exports. A business only has real resources to invest in new equipment because somebody is forgoing immediate consumption. If those resources (or claims to resources) are exchanged for worthless equipment, gross capital formation is zero.
So we have a reduction in final consumption with no gross capital formation, which
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Actually, you're the idiot here. GNP is a technical term, and you were pointed to the definition of it. It's a mechanism for estimating production and productivity.
It's not a perfect measure, for a number of reasons, including the one you pointed out. But that's the fault of the measure, and you were the one who brought it up.
If you mean productivity, say "productivity". Use the wrong technical term and people will generally ignore it, but when you call them an idiot for validly correcting you, it means
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it measures the total dollar value of all final goods and services produced...
minus capital consumption [wikipedia.org], which you are forgetting.
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Correct, but all my examples do.
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Me too, but sadly "good use" is not a factor in GDP calculations.
Yeah, and then some (Score:2)
So we had a major upgrade project. Our old authentication software on old hardware was going to be replaced with new software, new hardware, and a new architecture made possible by the features in the new software.
Months of planning, rearchitecting, tripping over bugs ("oh, it's fixed in the next major version"), and testing, and it turns out that the software from vendor A does not work acceptably on the hardware from...vendor A.
Throw the plan out, and start from scratch on new hardware. Halfway through, v
Too much common sense... head... 'sploding.. (Score:2)
Yes! There are so many features that end up being hindrances or that fall short of actual needs that it makes an investment not worth while. For example, here's what I want ou
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it's nice to list what you want, but others want something else too. That's just the way the world works. It's just QQ to me
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Ok, you're correct by tautology. I want something as do other people. Bravo! But you're not really commenting in the context of the article. You call it "QQ", but the Red Hat CEO calls it wasting hundreds of billions of dollars shotgunning bad features at users that don't want them.
It's an insane idea, but even the auto manufacturing industry modulizes features better than the tech industry.
Base Car = 15,000
Automatic Transmission = 1200
Built-in GPS = 500 + any subscription fee
Bigger engine = 1000
Alloy Wheel
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That is how the auto companies list the prices on the sticker, but try to actually buy a car that has just the features you want (for example, bigger engine but no alloy wheels). Most of the time you will find the options are only sold in packages, pretty much like different 'editions' of software.
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See but I want GPS. And if it costs the manufacturer $1.50 for the GPS chip then why do you care if I get GPS?
Red Hat is Wrong (Score:2)
If all Software and IT needs were being funneled into new projects and new features and new ideas then the Red Hat guy might be write. This is not the case however. Most Software development done in the world is based on specific needs generated by specific customers on existing IT systems. It is a painfully slow, deliberate process that sometimes produces astonishingly public failures. Most of the time what is produced is quite successes that for the most part do what the customer wanted done.
A couple
"only half of all features are used" = by design (Score:2)
[evil]As a guy who puts together some of the software packages you buy I can tell you that bundling of commonly and rarely used functionality often happens by design. And it doesn't just happen in the software industry: car manufacturers do it when they bundle their options too. The advantages of bundling for the buyer are: fewer choices (shorter lead time if you know what you want) and better budgeting (fewer trips "back to the well" for more money); the advantages for the seller are: cost containment (
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This is a subject I know something about. Cable TV pricing for ESPN is complex, because ESPN has multiple revenue streams. ESPN advertising revenues depend not only on the number of actual viewers, but on the number of potential viewers as well. The price sheets are tightly-held secrets, but a cable company with 16
Meanwhile.. in the real world (Score:2)
Companies developing software are still raking in billions of dollars. Maybe stop giving the shit away for free...
chief information officers holding all the risk (Score:2)
worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.
*begin ill-tempered, sleep-deprived rant*
I can certainly understand why some suited weasels would want to buy their way out of any personal responsibility, but seriously, ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHERE THE RISK BELONGS?! I thought that's why we paid them all that money, because they had the 'l33t business and organizational skills to handle the risk, like professional ball players. They're "superstar talent," remember?
God forbid a CIO actually have the get off their fat ass and, you know, TEST an implementation b
The features that you never use (Score:2)
were still used by somebody, and typically that's the biggest customer of that software. For instance, in the world of enterprise software, when you're a small upstart company, you first innovate to create the first release. They you add the project managers and the MBAs, and you need justification to add new features, and that's usually coming from demands from the biggest customers who threaten to kick you out and cancel the maintenance money.
So why are there features in the product that 50% of the custom
Oh bullcookies. (Score:2)
It costs nearly $0 to deliver a unit of software, no matter the feature set included.
So when someone buys a package to get one feature and is the only user of that feature, then he pays the full price of the software to get that feature.
And everyone else pays the full price to get the features they want and can safely ignore that feature, or try it out and start using it if they wish.
None of them, not one, came close to paying the full development cost for any feature they're using, but all, in aggregate, w
I'm in the middle of this actually... (Score:2)
Creating software vs purchasing (Score:2, Interesting)
In the early 80s 2 groups existed. One was to only use prepackaged software and the other is to use your programmers to create your own solution. His rant backs the former group but unfortunately it is viewed as an expense commodity that does not add value to a ROI. The battle to use prepackaged software has won. Until investment is viewed as a profit center and not a cost center no business will bother to hire programmers to create software to do what it is they need to do rather than buy a prepackaged blo
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Insightful)
So then you have never worked with Oracle, SAP, or Symantec, so which vendors are you talking about?
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Funny)
I hope their sales engineers were wearing name badges. It would have been unnerving for them to have you stand next to them yelling "YOU ARE NOTHING!" in their ears.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Informative)
Amusing. I work for a large utility up here in Canadia, supposedly one of the top 3 purchasers of Oracle & SAP in my province, and we've only seen the sales reps walking around, usually cracking down on not-enough-licenses issues.
Talk to them about an issue or feature you need, and it becomes a chorus of NO's followed by sales people trying to convince us Package X does all that (it doesn't) for a low, low price of Y (it isn't low, and it's always more than Y when the bill comes).
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Never seen them (vendor engineers). Seriously. Where did you work where they would talk to you?
There are medium to smallish companies we buy software from, and they have sent their engineers to observe & talk to us. But none of the big boys have ever sent any engineer to us.
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LOL! Good one. :-)
Proximity is entirely the reason you saw them.
Although for the small to mid sized vendors I mentioned, they did fly in and stay for a few weeks.
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He who trusts sales reps is a moron. Software, hardware or new cars, sales people alway lie.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:4, Interesting)
But if your just 'Joe Sixpacks Beer Store' you are generally screwed. But in that case you probably also wouldn't want to pay for the costs of proper attention, if you would be willing to pay for all the hours spend to accomodate your needs you would be served (and go bankrupt). Building software isn't cheap, an you are going to pay the full price for anything that is build just for you one way or another.
And the of course there are the governmental projects, but those are in a league of their own. Those are the projects where you send the people you wouldn't dare sending to any of your bigger customers. Government officials spending tax dollars will always pay, regardless of how badly things get screwed up. (The amount you get to spend seems to be a dick size issue, and it's all just tax money anyway...).
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He's a centipede?
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I dismiss any accounts which people add numbers after as such. It is an attempt to escape their past actions on slashdot. A cowardly act even on the internet.
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The numbers after your name you keep changing, due to your karma getting to low. You know what I meant. At least this is my only slashdot account.
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At the very least, you need an English lesson and some anti-psychotics.
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Maybe because I rather not have nutcases like you know where I live. You really should consider that, never know when a bigger nutcase might come after you.
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Says the guy who makes more accounts to get out of any responsibility for his comments.
You sir are a hypocrite.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Real world example, and why I don't do software development:
A customer was using a text field in a database for a "date". They wanted to have that field usable to send out notices (dog tag renewals) on a date. I was wondering why the database field wasn't set to the "Date" type proceeded to convert the field to that type. Proceeded to setup a query and template to generate the notices automatically, rather than manually doing it as had been.
I then proceeded to show the primary user that made the request the changes, how to enter the dates and thought I had done a awesome job making the software better (it was better). The user used the system for a week or so, but couldn't for the life of her figure out why it wasn't working.
So I make a house call out to the facility and watch her as she enters a new date 10/20 into the database. Well the software beeps and tells her the date is invalid (duh), and she complains that she has to type in the year.
Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.
No, I'm not kidding.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a prime example of not listening to what the users want.
It is trival for the software to figure out what the current year is. With a small amount of effort done once on the part of the programmer to convert a day/month (or month/day) date into a full date, the user would have been happy, the software would have worked as they wanted it to and it would have been quicker and less error-prone for them to enter the data.
Instead the software vendor implemented what they thought the user wanted and more importantly didn't listen to the user completely, they implemented half of what the end user wanted and this resulted in more work having to undo the work that had been done to revert the system back to the "old 'n busted" way it was before.
Customers ask for things they want, but the developer needs to be willing to listen to them,
I had a similar thing happen recently, however this was for a database I was developing for my own purposes.
It has a field type of time, but it's really strict - you must enter a time as hh:mm[:ss] AM|PM anything else beeps at you as being invalid (duh)
With some coding effort and a liberal amount of google searching, I was able to have this field exhibit a lot more intelligence and be infinitely more user-friendly. I now have it so that you can enter just about anything that can be interpreted as a time and it'll sort it out. I get the computer, not the user, to do the hard work.
Now, I can enter 800 and it will be 08:00 am (I have a range of hours defined that are AM or PM - 700 is 7pm for instance - this is completely arbitrary and works perfectly for the intended use)
I can enter 1525 and it will enter 3:25 PM, I can enter 4 and it will enter 4PM, I can enter 9 and it will enter 9am. I can enter 12:34 and it will also take it...
It's now a lot quicker for me to quickly enter a few numbers rather than enter numbers separated by colons and an explicit am or pm. It's also a lot less error prone as there's less thought involved, less keystrokes and no need to use a shift+key stroke combination.
In your example, a few more minutes of coding effort to detect a supposedly invalid date (I know what 10/20 is, the user knows what 10/20 is, you know what it is, so tell the computer what it is) and everyone would have been happy.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:4, Interesting)
that all works until someone needs 4 to mean AM sometimes and PM all the other time.
Defaulting the current year makes sense, until you have cards for December being entered in January (11 months difference), a common yearly adventure.
Did you miss the part that she would rather manually sort through the records than type two characters?
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:4, Insightful)
that all works until someone needs 4 to mean AM sometimes and PM all the other time.
Defaulting the current year makes sense, until you have cards for December being entered in January (11 months difference), a common yearly adventure.
Did you miss the part that she would rather manually sort through the records than type two characters?
Your heart was in the right place, but failed when you fixed a pain the customer didn't mind by creating one they did.
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The customer wanted to be able to sort by dates, I did that. The pain of doing things differently wasn't about anything other than not wanting to change when change is what was requested.
I would rather type to extra numbers than have to manually sort though records because data in a field wasn't indexable (DBaseIII) the way the customer wanted. But that is me, I can see the benefit of not doing things the hard way, and changing how I do things to get things done better, more efficiently.
Of course it is easy
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The user initially loved the idea of the proper date field - a small tweak to it and they would have been completely happy.
Defaulting to the year makes sense, as long as you have a well defined rule for it that the user can understand - if you commonly enter records for Jan of the following year in December, make it so that a month of 01 when entered late in the year is for the following year - similar to how most vendors worked around the y2k bug by having a rule that anything after (for example) 40 was 19
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Extensive-Date-Parsing.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
STFU.
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So, you'd rather an end user when forced by a database program that will only accept explicitly formed times to enter hh:mm AM or hh:mm PM (and not any close variant of this, such as hh:mm am) rather than entering something a lot quicker and less prone to error, such as 7p or 1245.
In the first case, entering 7:00 PM this takes 9 keystrokes, including the Shift key. Reduce that to 2.
In the second case, entering 12:45 PM this also takes 9 keystrokes and is reduced to 4.
If you're doing this hundreds of times
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I want to know what 13 turns into? 1:30AM? 1PM? 1:30PM?
And is there a standards body willing to assume stewardship over your Time/Date markup language?
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13 turns into 13:00 which is 1pm.
130 turns into 1:30 PM (as explained before 7 is defined as PM)
How is this so difficult to understand?
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13 is also 00:13
13 is also 1:30
13 is also 13:00
which one of those is right when I type 13?
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I have a hard time seeing how someone could reasonably think any of the first two would be possible. It looks to me like you're just arguing for the sake of arguing now.
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Exactly! if you ask me the time, and I say it's "two" you immediately know I don't mean it's 00:02 (as in two past midnight) and you're also generally not asking me this at 02:00 (or 2:00 AM) as if I'm talking to you at that hour, I'm not going to be making any sense, so you know straight away that it's 14:00 or 2:00 PM.
Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?
I tell my software that a job is starting at 8 and finishing at 930. It knows what I mean.
How on earth could anyone assume that 13 is 1
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13 is also 00:13
13 is also 1:30
13 is also 13:00
which one of those is right when I type 13?
This is crazy talk. I'm just glad that you aren't writing any parsing software for me.
13 is "thirteen hundred hours" which can also be entered as 1300, 13:00, 1p, 1:00 p, 100p, 1:30 PM, 1:30 etc...
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Intelligent date/time parsing is hard, and not available everywhere perfectly yet. I would kill to have a function in python that parsed as well as Google Calendar.
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Look, I'll concede that I'm not a coder - I can cut and paste and make small changes and that's about it.
The code I have in FileMaker Pro to do what I want is well and truly WTF-worthy, however it saves the users of this database a large number of keystrokes. This improves their accuracy, it improves the speed at which data can be entered and most importantly of all, it is what the end users wanted (arrived at through a process of refinement) so I have happy end users who have a system they are happy to wor
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Hell yeah, doesn't it ever!
Developing in it is a pain in the arse for sure, but for a cross-platform database with a half-decent layout engine for creating decent looking forms, it's hard to beat.
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exactly.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So in that case it's a process of refinement - implement what they say they want and seek feedback on the implementation rather than implementing what they say they want (even though their spec was incomplete) and saying "There, that's it. Take it or leave it"
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In what dream world will they keep paying for all these one off solutions?
Users want cheap, good and fast. Providing all three is impossible.
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People say, "why are software projects still so expensive and time-consuming" - I say, compared to what? Some imaginary utopia where software projects are much easier than they actually are?
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No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.
You have to listen to what they say, and intuit what they want, then formulate it, and ask them if that is right.
If you can't do that much, software development for a customer is probably the wrong field for you. Though you might manage to do code monkey / slave to the designer work, who works to someone else's precisely defined spec.
Since that doesn'
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No, simply listening to what users want will almost never work - because they don't know. Almost always, they have some vague idea, but that's it.
Do you write "Utter Arsehole" on your business cards, or do you let people work it out for themselves when they talk to you for the first time?
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I love how retarded your description is.
800 = 8:00am
700 = 7:00pm
????
Seriously, stfu.
Re:WHAT vendors? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you miss the part where I said:
If I'm booking an onsite technician for instance, they are not going to be onsite at 7am, I'm not sending anyone out that early in the morning, yet it's completely possible they'll be doing work after hours starting at 6 or 7.
In the same light, I'm not sending anyone out to start work at 8pm, but would quite happily have someone going out at 8am.
In this case, what is "retarded" about having a rule that determines that 8 .. 11 is AM and 12, 1 ... 7 is PM?
In the extremely rare situation that this rule doesn't apply, enter the time as "7" for instance and it gets corrected to 07:00 AM, change the A to a P and you're done. Either that, or enter the time as "7p" and it's put in as 7:00 PM
Or would you rather have to enter every single time value as hh:mm:ss AM|PM explicitly?
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Just imagine getting a cab to the airport. Once you're in, the driver tells you that the road to the train depot is much faster and nicer.
Sure. you didn't get what you wanted, you got something much better instead, and if you learn about train schedule you might be thankful later.
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Sorry but most of the time, the customer has no fucking idea what they want.
They want something, but they just don't know what. they're going to ask changes for the hell of it and need some time to then decide it was a bad idea and request the change to be reverted.
now that doesn't mean developers always know what the customer wants, far from it. but he has all the tools and knowledge to figure it out, because he knows how everything works. the customer, is clueless basically. (in most cases at least)
that's
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Customers are fickle, ask for things they want, but aren't willing to implement. I had to unwind the changes even though they made the database much more functional and saved time, all because the primary user didn't want to type two extra characters, it was easier compiling the notices by hand.
So why couldn't you put a hack in the UI that checked if the date was in MM/DD format and default to the current year (or next, if you were storing the expiration)? Some odd notion of "the UI data format must exact
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The user is right: why should she spend extra effort? Don't we have computers to make those efforts for us?
More specifically: couldn't you have included a filter that would recognize a MM/DD date and turn it into a correct one before inserting it in the database? Plenty of DB engines nowadays support REGEX in triggers.
I think you're blaming the wrong person.
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You're missing the point. (besides making assumptions that is is a current problem)
This was back in DbaseIII days (DOS,40x25 screens, monochrome CRTs). The problem is customers wanting something, but not willing to do what it might take to get there. OFTEN times choosing the harder way (manually sorting records) rather than doing things "differently".
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Almost nobody who is paid to develop software is thinking "you're kidding". They're thinking "why not just append the year before submitting to the database?". It really wasn't the customer who was being silly and inflexible here.
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No, it was a limitation of the Database (DBase III), on 40x25 Monochrome CRTs attached to DOS (XT/286). Just because it can be done easier today doesn't mean that was always the case.
And which completely misses the point, that customers want what they want, even if it is not possible (budget, complexity, timelines, features).
In this case, I provided exactly what the customer asked, the at the time, budget and complexity that was all manageable. The customer didn't want to change how they did things, but wan
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You fucked up.
Always allow defaults for un-entered fields.
And yes, that field you used had sub-fields that should have defaulted. In fact, the day and month should have defaulted as well.
You're like those dopes who put telephone-number entry fields in forms and then lazily put directions on formatting them into the webpage instead of just detecting the dashes and parentheses or lack of them yourself.
Go do it again.
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How dare the customer want their life to work as straightforward as it did before the change. If entering 10/20 always meant 10/20/, the fact they lost this for the sake of 'cleaner' and using more of the DB capability is a valid complaint.
The missing piece there is why the user is interacting directly with the DB, rather than some form that takes the input, sanitizes, and does nice things like append current year if year is omitted. This way, you get to use the capabilities of the DB, provide more resili
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of course you're not. i'm getting this kind of stories every week at work. It pisses me off major time.
usually I just implement the features i think are the best and the way *i* think are the most efficient, and the way i would like them if i was the user (of course being a programmer and all might not always be spot on but still)
then usually many people like, and eventually some stupid customer (really) wants to change a useful feature into a bad one, or add useless things to it.
i warn that it's going to b
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your improvements suck
10/20 should be a perfectly valid data entry. Your interface to the database should deal with it accordingly.
The reason you don't do software dev is your attitude to your customers.
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Until she starts putting "Yesterday" in the box...
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why else have a text field? let them type in "2 weeks ago" and make it work... IT'S TRIVIAL.
i'd make the interface with a calendar popup and navigation buttons to jump days and weeks and months and years.
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Don't even need anything that complicated - at least one DBE I can think of of will let you put TODAY or TODAY-N into a date field and automagically do the calculations for you.
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sorry, meant DBMS. Too early in the morning....
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Exactly what I wondered. The gp post seems like a great candidate for the daily.
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then when the user asked for a trivial feature to return the workload back to what it was before, the vendor gave up and trashed all their work
Obviously... the vendor couldn't take even the smallest criticism, and apparently decided they wanted to make a point out of the whole thing, rather than address things in a reasonable manner.
This is not a technology problem, this is a customer service problem. The parent did have one thing right, however, he obviously should not be in software development wor
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You and the other people are missing the point.
I could have really customized the code and done a whole bunch of sanity checks on the user input, all to save two digits being entered. All of which would increase complexity and other types of problems. Defaulting to current year in programming logic is great, until it isn't. Then you're in a race to fix the exceptions, which adds to bloat and slowness.
And it is no wonder that there is so much database fubar out there with people coding defaults, having to fi
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don't forget to verify that the system is using the proper fucking time in the first place.
I got what you were saying, dipshit (key user - I love that this implies that OTHER fucking people may have benefited from the work destroyed) didn't want to enter two characters, so scrapped what was probably a 300% increase in efficiency.
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Bingo, we have a winner.
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Ideological arguments have no place in developing software for your boss.
If they ask you for feature X, you can inform them of the issues and give them a choice. The choice to avoid "feature bloat" is not your choice, if all the features are demanded or wanted by the customer.
Nothing really excuses failing to validate input, whether 'abbreviations' of some sort are allowed or not.
Checking for a 'year value not provided' and appending a default in the user interface code is so trivial and rele
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Yeah, the place I work at spends a lot of time and money understanding what our customers need, and we have a focus on software customization to boot so if it isn't exactly what they need (and each customer has slightly differing needs) they can get to what they want with relative ease.
Of course, we've also had over 50 implementations of large scale enterprise software and 0 failures, so we don't have our fair cut of the 500 billion worth of failure money.
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every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want....
I have to say that at no time has Microsoft ever tried to determine what I want.
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"every vendor i've worked with takes great effort in determining what the users want..."
Maybe. But they take even greater effort in determining what *they* want. Sometimes that's related to users's desires, sometimes (i.e.: lock-in, closed-source distribution license) not.
Re:Actively used features (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Broken how? (Score:5, Insightful)
But out side of ERP systems which almost always get customized, getting a commercial vendor to modify the product to suit your specific needs is nearly impossible, unless your are an F500. That is where Open Source can be a win.
Open source is great when you want some special behavior in the sales quoting tool that only a tiny fractions of others anywhere would want but you otherwise want the base set of features the mass market wants. If you select an open source tool you can make those modifications. If you select a product with a fairly mature code base its probably not even that costly in terms of developer time to keep your patch set applying cleaning against version latest.
Re:Broken how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, vendors that have their shit together will listen to their customers.
This morning I'm trying to push a feature we would like to see (rather need) for some hot backup operations. While there are several documented work arounds that will mostly work it does not offer a consistent solution. While we certainly do not drive the features from this particular vendor they will at least listen. At heart most software shops are driven by a need to solve a problem. Now, unless you have money pouring out your ear holes it pays to see how many people really want this feature. Thus, the guy who is more or less the expert in our given area is going to go beat some drums and see if he can find a few others who are in our same boat.
Thus if there is a collective need (which I believe there is) then we can see more drive on this particular goal. Open source works pretty much the same way and the more popular the problem then the more likelihood of seeing it corrected. Anyone who does not listen to their customers either doesn't need to or will simply suffer from it. I suspect that statement has some gray to it because with enough marketing and salesliars it should be possible to get cash from anything.
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But this is exactly the point, software does not bend to their business needs and countless businesses have had to adjust the way they work to cater to whatever software they happen to be running...
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In other words, don't equate the effort to the results: you can still work very hard (in terms of effort intensity) to produce waste (in terms of achieved results) - chances are, though, you'll have a better share (in absolute terms, even if not as a percentage) if your efforts result in something that's useful.
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F#ck yeah, and I'm on /. to grow my share!
FTFY.
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http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell [theoatmeal.com]
When collaborating with the user goes wrong...