Enterprise software bloat is driven by buyers negotiating on missing features
Chad Fowler · FF 016: Chad Fowler, CTO @ Wunderlist, App Of The Year 2013 · Oct 9, 2015 · at 8:26
Chad Fowler, CTO of Wunderlist, explains the structural incentives that lead to bloated enterprise software during a discussion on product design and simplicity.
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“And it's all about the historical war between customers and suppliers of enterprise business software, where it's like this self-defeating fight for features and complexity. It's all driven on fear and it's driven on, you know, fear based negotiation tactics. So I've been on the purchasing end of this at big companies in the past. And the way it sort of plays out is you're trying to negotiate a license for some business software. And you ask for everything you might ever possibly want. Every ridiculous bit of complexity you can think of. And ultimately, if the vendor can't say yes to everything, you can use that as a way to significantly drive down the price when you're comparing vendors. So vendors end up saying yes, which means the software that they create gets worse and worse and more complex over time. And it ultimately makes the experience for the customer way worse as well.”
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