I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t say anything negative about person X’s plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn’t justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don’t often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.

Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user

Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.

Nor necessarily SaaS, but yes business tooling. Which is the vast majority of software if you include software businesses buy and make thier customers use. The incentive is for it to work, not for it to work well. The person who signed off on the purchase either will never know how bad it is because they don’t use it and are insulated by other staff from feedback, or because they are incentivesed to downplay and ignore complaints to make thier decision look good at their level in the company.

The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.

Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.

Okay then the users aren’t subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn’t really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.

Well it doesn’t have to be a formal contract… but I was thinking there would be like a website with a selection you could pick from, print out, sign and done. And the main reason was to make getting out of a bad relationship clear easy, and most likely no courts involved since everything was already spelled out. Open sourced contracts would in theory be well vetted to be fair.

Good luck to them on that… cause that is how you get a revolution. Lol

When the buyer isn’t the user (which is most of the time), no there isn’t. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don’t really have much choice. Bell’s and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.

Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.

I for one hope this simply leads to the end of marriage. That whole concept is built rather one sided. Time for relationship contracts… renewable, but always finite. With separation details worked out in advance. Let’s get religion out of it entirely.

No… the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won’t use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.

No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.

Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest… tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn’t menstruating or hasn’t stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.

That’s a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.

There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.

My parents tell stories like these about the Pennsylvania coal mines from last century. They would just drop the person alive or dead on thier front porch with thier last paycheck pinned to them.

While I agree with the sentiment, this isn’t correct. They aren’t actively interfering. They are refusing to interfer when it’s thier job. And the structure was designed to remove them from undue influence of the other branches… not from politics in general, or from outside influence. Fact is, noone is truely impartial, and outside influences are pretty much impossible to remove. So the whole idea of a court that is above that is just ludicrous.

I did get a federal loan for college, so guess I must have enrolled without really knowing it. It was a really long time ago.