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points by ghshephard 3 days ago | 0 comments
I've gone through at least 30+ iterations of CRMs / Bug/ Issue/ WorkTrackers/ AP/ Expense / Project tooling in 7 companies over 20 years.

One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.

Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.

This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.

The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.

Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.

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