haha. I don't see why all the angst here. The place I work at also has a big VB legacy code base that has to be moved to the cloud.
Furthermore, a lot of these large companies start off with a MVP hastily knocked up from 4GL tools and spend a lot of time doing customer development. (remember lean?)
Eventually they get big enough to be able to afford proper software engineering processes.
Gianforte of RightNow, a big enterprise player, started off in his bedroom with a list of possible features and lots of phone calls.
I've no idea why your first comment was downvoted. I've seen SAPs HCM interfaces and SuccessFactor's. The SF one definitely looks cleaner, more responsive (Web 2.0, Ajax and all). This is purely my own opinion. It may not be the case with all products of SF, but definitely the ESS/MSS modules. and you are absolutely right, these businesses lean more towards customer development, and hopefully, probably, catch up on other fronts(processes, eng quality etc) later. When I was there, SF had a pretty reasonable dev process and a reasonable codebase.
HN community tend to have a knee jerk response against enterprise software. They forget that Steve Blank of "4 Steps to Epiphany" made his fortune in enterprise software.
That is only because a lot of the developers don't have a sense of appreciation of how far the state-of-the-art has progressed.
The previous developers who put together the code aren't totally clueless people. Unless we wish for our own work to be brushed off in the same way we did to our predecessors. Future developers are going to laugh off at the cheesy way we develop our mobile and tablet apps.
Some of the original code had to work under onerous memory constraints, and have all manners of workarounds for various platform incompatibilities. Think IE6 hacks, pre-AJAX code when a sizeable portion of browsers could not script.
Do I think enterprise software as it is today can be disrupted? Yes, I do. But do I think the enterprise software vendors and developers are clueless? No, absolutely not. Many of them have adopted agile processes and are as fast as any other developer. If you want to disrupt enterprise software, you need to disrupt the sales channel, like what Salesforce and SuccessFactors did.
Do I think enterprise software as it is today can be disrupted? Yes, I do. But do I think the enterprise software vendors and developers are clueless? No, absolutely not. Many of them have adopted agile processes and are as fast as any other developer. If you want to disrupt enterprise software, you need to disrupt the sales channel, like what Salesforce and SuccessFactors did.
