[HN Gopher] Is this what enterprise means?
___________________________________________________________________
Is this what enterprise means?
Author : steffoz
Score : 336 points
Date : 2021-05-05 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| EricE wrote:
| "There is no cloud - just someone else's computer"
|
| Ha!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| As a Java developer, my understanding was that "enterprise" means
| AbstractFactoryBuilderSingletonInterface.
| forcer wrote:
| This thread feels like dejavu for me. I had been going through
| exactly the same with MS Azure couple of years back. MS gave us
| some Azure free credits and once they expired it was series of
| stressful months to get the billing going. Constant emails with
| different layers of support people and no one could help us to
| PAY for Azure.
| [deleted]
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The billing "system" at many large tech companies is a spaghetti
| of operations processes, third parties, and software. I can
| imagine that very few (if any) people know how the whole thing
| works end to end. Edge cases are so often, especially with
| acquired products, that you get situations like this.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I'm staggered by how many Fortune 500 companies are still
| faxing (!yes, faxing!) purchase orders and invoices around.
| xupybd wrote:
| I'm surprised PDF is the default format for emailed invoices
| and purchase orders. 99% of the time someone has to key that
| PDF into another system and most of the time they can't copy
| and paste anything from the source PDF.
| pedrocr wrote:
| The state of the art is to have OCR of those PDFs to
| automate it. There's a huge amount of corporate/enterprise
| solutions that are just working around not doing proper
| interfaces and integrations. There's even the concept of
| "Robotic Process Automation" to make working around not
| being able to deliver working software sound cool.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yep I use Doc parser as our customers don't want to setup
| custom EDR.
|
| I can understand that but I can't understand why
| accounting packages don't have a standardized EDR for
| Purchase Orders and Invoices.
|
| There are specs out there for example the GS1 spec,
| anything similar would be great.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Even in simpler days 1980's when the CFO brought an off the peg
| Accounts receivable system, that caused problems with the
| billing system I worked on.
|
| Eventually the system started writing broken BACS tapes and I
| had to fix the 6-7 months backlog of direct debits.
|
| Neither the Company Secretary or I got even a thank you for
| fixing the problems.
|
| Ok I did put Jack Scofield's (prominent uk tech journalists)
| bank account into the red :-)
| hinkley wrote:
| We don't call them "Piece of Shit" systems for nothing. They've
| gotten better over time of course, I recall how difficult it
| was to divide a check with my coworkers when I was just
| starting my career. But it seems like to some extent PoS only
| got any kind of love when tablet computers became widely
| available, and now the pretty iOS device anchored (in the
| psychological sense) expectations causing the definition of
| 'adequate' to shift fairly dramatically.
|
| Billing systems are a different beast from point of sale, but
| it always sounded to me like a similar philosophy ruled both
| realms.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The long standing programmer joke was "Yes, enterprise is all
| about paying more for bloated and buggy software after management
| is upsold."
|
| Much ink has been spilled over the antipattern of enterprise
| software arising from procurement failure by having the design
| focused on pleasing the people who in practice never actually use
| it.
|
| Billing and collection being out to screw you over is a cliche.
| Especially the infamous cases when they screw up and hassle you
| for bills not owed. It appears there was a marriage between the
| despised.
| jollybean wrote:
| Companies need to start billing back for these screw ups.
|
| If the seller screws up this or that, it's an immediate 10%
| discount. When it hits the bottom line where the CFO can see it,
| then it has to be fixed.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It feels like the future follows the peter principle. We raise
| the technological level but it's still the same people dealing
| with new unknowns leading to new kinds of mistakes.
| debacle wrote:
| If you are paying market rates for slightly above the
| competence you need, you are "leaving money on the table."
|
| If you are getting slightly below the competence you need to be
| effective, and can push the cost of the friction onto your
| customers, you're coming out ahead of the game.
| agumonkey wrote:
| do you know where to read about such force/dynamics ?
| [deleted]
| rblatz wrote:
| Did accounting see the invoice payments getting withdrawn
| monthly?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| This seems to be a symptom of many acquisitions. Especially
| during the transition everything goes to hell. And of course
| meetings to discuss issues are way more important than resolving
| issues.
| entropyneur wrote:
| > Is this what Enterprise mean?
|
| Yes, yes it is!
| ineedasername wrote:
| Not really an "Enterprise" issue. Traditional enterprise
| companies will be more than happy to make it easy to take your
| money, absent occasional silly mistakes like invoicing the wrong
| department, or any department instead of a centralized accounts
| payable finance department. Although the times I saw that happen
| where I work was because the department making the purchase put
| their own address on the vendor's billing system when all
| purchases are supposed to use the centralized accounts payable
| address.
|
| From the thread, this seems more like the problems you get with
| SaaS when it is run with minimal customer service.
| bruhhh wrote:
| why is this on the front page? shitpost...
| janlukacs wrote:
| ran into similar issues a couple of times - hate doing business
| with anything that has the label "enterprise" attached to it...
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enterprisey
|
| For a short while after the term was coined it even had a
| Wikipedia page, but it was eventually deleted for not meeting
| the Notability guidelines. The current Wikipedia page for
| Enterprise software doesn't even have a hint of criticism of
| the genre. I did find this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209
| corty wrote:
| This is why you generally do not pay via credit card at the whim
| of a vendor.
|
| You pay via bank transfer after receiving a bill. A proper,
| written, paper, tax-legal bill. One that gets a few stamps and
| signatures by your accounting department, by the department that
| ordered said software and maybe internal IT. Only then is the
| transfer issued.
|
| If a vendor cannot be bothered to send a bill properly, well, it
| isn't worth the hassle. Only hilarity will ensue, as can be seen
| from the OP.
| ajcp wrote:
| I agree. If you're at the scale where you require an Enterprise
| solution, you should also have some level of finance department
| that knows how to handle purchase orders, invoices, and ledgers
| of account. This enables transparent vendor account to customer
| account reconciliation. Credit cards leave everyone in the
| dark.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Credit cards can also be a ~1% cash back across the board for
| the business and tools like Brex, Divvy, Airbase, etc... can
| provide even more spending visibility + budget tracking.
|
| These tools can also offer virtual cards, auto coding of
| expenses, and spending caps by card.
|
| ACH is better (lower cost) for the vendor but a proper card-
| based spend mgmt setup might be better for most buyers.
| wmf wrote:
| Then the vendor deletes all your data for having unpaid
| invoices and _you_ suffer. This isn 't what I would call
| hilarity.
| binbag wrote:
| You shouldn't give them your business then.
| acchow wrote:
| Why would the bill that's satisfied by a bank transfer be any
| different from a bill satisfied by a credit card transaction?
| steffoz wrote:
| They say they never received any notification either.
| Havoc wrote:
| Some true salesforce DNA injected there. Few pieces of software
| left me as frustrated as salesforce
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Can you give some examples?
| Havoc wrote:
| There was one form (to add a customer I think). Really simply
| deal - 5 text boxes and a create button.
|
| Wouldn't let you click create because its complaining about
| missing fields (telephone or sector or something).
|
| Except the form literally doesn't have a fields for that
| stuff.
|
| We also had tons of issues with duplicates because
| well...global org & suddenly thousands of inexperienced
| people try to jam stuff on there. So the guy in Egypt links
| his stuff to Australia because many countries have a "Road
| Construction Ltd" etc. And then the sales figures pull
| through cross jurisdication etc. And then the guy in
| Australia deletes it cause its messing up his dashboard. Just
| carnage.
|
| TBF I knew our copy of SF was very heavily customized (big
| contract) & I could sorta see the vision behind it. Perhaps
| the roll-out was just overly ambitious (bad ERP rollout
| style) rather than the software inherently bad.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Have you dealt with Oracle?
| Havoc wrote:
| haha....I knew about the stories, dabbled with their free
| tier cloud and quickly realized the stories are credible.
|
| e.g. the cloud interface and price list had different SKUs.
| Much googling later I found some sketchy site that had
| attempted to map them grid style but still had lots of "???"
| where they just don't fkin map.
|
| I was ready for per core billing but not that.
| cosmotic wrote:
| Unrolled:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389946268764475394.html
|
| #hownottousetwitter
|
| Summary: Salesforce acquires heroku and alarming billing errors
| ensue.
| briffle wrote:
| Anatomy of a buy-out:
|
| Step 1. "We bought this company because we love the product,
| nothing is changing"
|
| -- At this point, smart employees (that have been here before)
| without retention bonuses are leaving
|
| Step 2. "We are going to combine some processes, to lower our
| costs"
|
| --There goes many of the backend people that actually knew the
| how/why of the system.
|
| Step 3. "Our customers love our support and development, and
| are willing to pay a bit more. We can cut back/outsource some
| development/support costs, to increase profit. Just a bit, to
| make our money back"
|
| -- At this point, if your retention bonus is fulfilled, you are
| gone
|
| Step 4. "This quarterly profit isn't high enough to meet
| analysts expectations. We are cutting 10% from every group's
| budgets"
|
| --at this point, the only people left are those that have no
| other options.
|
| Step 5. "We have problems in Engineering, Support, and
| operations. Lets outsource it, so we don't keep having to deal
| with all this turnover".
|
| Step 6. "Our sales are a fraction of their former level. Lets
| take this huge pile of cash we made, and buy another company.
| We love their product!"
| hinkley wrote:
| There's an earlier Step 2 where they tell you that they
| aren't going to tell you how to manage your division, and
| then tell you that they won't pay for some of your
| initiatives.
|
| Because strangling an initiative by withdrawing all funding
| isn't saying 'no' I guess? I'll never understand how that
| works.
|
| Usually that squeeze happens in the second fiscal year, and
| in some cases the 'combine processes' step is characterized
| as a carrot instead of a stick.
| alunchbox wrote:
| Rinse and repeat!
|
| Too many great products ruined in the pursuit of growth and
| greed.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Salesforce acquired Heroku 11 years ago--only 3 years after it
| was founded.
| salawat wrote:
| Back office and payment settling is hell. No one thinks getting
| people paid is hard until you actually have to deal with managing
| 1000's of businesses all with their own turnover of who is
| responsible for receiving things, all capable of getting bought
| out or re-org'd at any time.
|
| It's way harder than it looks, but many places don't even think
| about it in the early stages because they want that core
| competency built; but they completely miss that being able to
| send accurate bills and invoices is undeniably core competency.
| Do not be one of these places, and learn to recognize the warning
| signs.
| cptskippy wrote:
| This sounds like a less funny version of the time I ordered a
| couch off Amazon.
|
| I ordered 1 couch, I paid for 1 couch, I was delivered 1 couch. I
| was delivered 1 more couch a week later. I called to explain the
| error and they came and took 1 couch. I received notice that I
| needed to schedule delivery of 1 couch. I called and got the
| delivery of 1 couch cancelled. I received notice of a refund for
| 1 couch. I called to explain that I needed to pay for 1 couch. I
| authorized Amazon to charge me again for my 1 couch I was sitting
| on.
|
| Each time I spoke to Amazon I was given a $75 credit. I still
| have never been charged for my 1 couch.
| Syzygies wrote:
| At the 1996 MacWorld there was a bin of floppies for
| Earthlink's dial-up service supporting the then-new World Wide
| Web.
|
| They weren't prepared for the server crush. I made nine
| attempts to create an account, before succeeding. Each time the
| attempt hung in mid-session. Once I got far enough to see my
| preferred login was not available. In my frustration I gave
| that presumed stranger a referral credit.
|
| Then I got billed for nine accounts. There were unique
| transaction numbers, but my credit card company didn't use
| them, and couldn't keep track of otherwise identical
| transactions.
|
| To this day I want Earthlink to rot in hell for how they
| treated me throughout this conflict. They brought this on
| themselves. They accused me of fraud for the unintended self-
| referral. As Don Johnson once said in a less safe-for-work
| context, we all rely on the kindness of strangers.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Amazon's entire customer service philosophy is basically will
| give you store credit out of good will.
|
| For example I once couldn't figure out how to build a table
| right, and I hopped on the phone with their customer service
| department and they refund it half of the price of the table.
| The same thing happened where I had a monitor which 8 months
| after I purchased it started having problems, they just
| refunded half the price.
|
| I'm pretty sure this only works for me because I spend at least
| $1,500 a month via Amazon, but even then it's business genius
| to operate like this. Many retailers would rather leave you out
| to dry, for example I purchased some shoes found they didn't
| fit and I was shocked when I simply couldn't return them. Guess
| I'll never go to that store again.
| feverfew wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure this only works for me because I spend at
| least $1,500 a month via Amazon
|
| What are you buying such that you're spending at least
| $18,000 a year on Amazon?
| idontpost wrote:
| I got close to that after buying a house and filling it
| with whatever things I figured out I needed but didn't want
| to drive to the store for (tools, cleaning supplies,
| kitchen stuff, holiday decorations, non food consumables,
| etc.)
|
| I can't see sustaining it indefinitely, but for a year or
| even two wouldn't shock me if you're not frugal and have a
| big empty house.
| xmprt wrote:
| I feel the same way. I don't spend nearly as much as you but
| I'm an Amazon Prime user and I haven't ever had an issue
| getting a refund on a product and in some cases where I ask
| to cancel a delivery after speaking to a representative, I
| get credit to use on my next purchase.
| nosianu wrote:
| When sound cards were still a thing even in mid-level PCs I
| once tried to call Dell for a driver issue related to the
| sound card that the high-end PC had come equipped with.
|
| I got zero help with the software issue, but they sent me a
| new card. I sold it on Ebay for ~$70 though so I did not
| complain. I solved the driver issue myself.
| [deleted]
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| What couch?
| cptskippy wrote:
| This one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I52XHLO/
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I had the same experience w/ my Apple AirPod pros. I thought I
| lost my pair, so ordered replacements. The first time, they
| only sent 1 of 2 headphones. I called, they shipped 2 new ones.
| I called Apple to return the extra bud, some wires got crossed,
| and they sent 2 more.
|
| At this point, I obviously found my originals. So I called
| Apple to try and send back the 3 extras they sent me (I would
| still have my originals + the replacements I paid for). They
| were unable to coordinate a return, told me to keep all of
| them.
|
| I now have 7 apple airpod buds.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Anyone know if Apple counted this as the sale of 7 units?
| lstamour wrote:
| Only the first pair counted as a sale, 1 sku of 2 units
| plus a case. The rest were replacements with their own SKU
| (probably) and are "sold" through a different channel.
| Revenue from Apple Support is still revenue, but it's not
| direct retail sales revenue like you're thinking.
|
| Also, I had a similar problem where I wanted a replacement
| airpods and a replacement case and had to wait for 3 boxes
| and ship back 3 boxes, and at one point got an extra bud
| sent to me and at another point got an empty laptop box
| with an empty airpods box sent to me. The whole experience
| of dealing with Apple Support by mail completely turned me
| off doing anything support-related by mail. At least Amazon
| figured out that store credits don't need anything to be
| mailed back! Apple seems a lot more competent in-store when
| these kind of supply chain goofs can be hidden away by
| store staff. It makes me wonder how often supplies are sent
| to the wrong store or need to be counted again, etc.
|
| Right now I'm waiting for a different part of Salesforce,
| Tableau, to get back to me about a licensing snafu where
| they billed me for the contract renewal, received my
| payment, but failed to have a system check if my licenses
| have expired and need to be re-issued, apparently. I
| suppose most people just reach out and ask for licenses
| keys to be re-assigned in advance, silly me for assuming it
| would be easy. This is definitely what enterprise means...
| Also my invoices from 4-5 years ago have disappeared from
| their system, and are the only evidence I have of what I
| purchased in the first place. Everything else lists a
| simple maintenance renewal sku and that's it. Feels like
| they forgot why I'm paying them a maintenance fee in their
| rush to ask for it.
| shoo wrote:
| > another point got an empty laptop box with an empty
| airpods box sent to me.
|
| maybe this is some kind of keep alive. we don't have any
| parts for you yet, just checking in with you at the
| shipping-empty-boxes layer
| towergratis wrote:
| A funny experience with DMV:
|
| I sent my payment via regular mail. 1 month later still don't
| have my registration renewal, so I start worrying. I call my
| bank to block the check, and go to DMV offices in person and
| make a payment using a credit card.
|
| After a couple of weeks I receive 2 letters from DMV the same
| day. One saying I double paid, and hence they are now include a
| check with my payment back. And another one saying my original
| check has bounced and that now I will have to make the payment
| using cashier's check and pay an extra $20 for the bounced
| check.
|
| I get a cashier check for the amount plus the $20 and make yet
| another payment.
|
| A couple of weeks later I receive another letter from DMV with
| a check returning the $20 penalty.
|
| So overall in the end we did balance things out, but took a
| while :D
| ufmace wrote:
| They seem to do this kind of thing all the time. Just recently,
| I ordered a few low-value-ish things, like $75 total. Email and
| app said it was delivered, but no package to be found, even a
| couple days later. Spent like half an hour digging through
| their web UI to find the "package never arrived" option, and
| they just refunded me without even talking to a person or
| answering any questions. Okay then.
|
| Then a couple days later, the package turned up after all.
| Turned out, the building staff hand-wrote the wrong apartment
| number in. I guess it took a couple of days for whoever was in
| the other apartment to get it, open it, realize it wasn't their
| stuff, send it back to the building staff, they figure out what
| went wrong, and tell me to pick it up.
|
| So now I have the package and the refund. I spent another 10 or
| 20 minutes on Amazon trying to find an option for I got the
| package after all. Couldn't find anything. Gave up and left it
| alone. I guess Amazon would rather let me keep the money than
| bother building the infrastructure for that case. I have a
| feeling it would take even longer to figure out a phone number
| to call and wait on hold to talk to a person who had the
| authority to do something not on a pre-set list.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I had a similar experience but it was due to FedEx constantly
| delivering Amazon packages to the wrong address in my
| neighborhood. We were 398 but FedEx always delivered to 389
| or 498. This continued even after we put a second set of
| house numbers on our mailbox.
|
| We eventually had Amazon ban FedEx as a shipper to our
| address.
| f6v wrote:
| They might have spent more on solving this than your couch was
| worth.
| cptskippy wrote:
| It was $1000 couch so possibly? I would imagine dispatching a
| freight shipper to pickup a couch was easily a couple hundred
| bucks though so I'm just surprised they never charged me
| again.
|
| I got a free couch and over $200 in credit for my trouble
| from Amazon.
| tyingq wrote:
| No dashboard, invoice amounts don't add to the total, etc.
| Doesn't Salesforce dogfood their own stuff? They have a billing
| product:
|
| https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/tools/cpq-so...
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| They know better that to risk the suspension of their account
| and deletion of their data by using a shit service provider.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Why can't these people just create a blog post and link to it? It
| takes 5 minutes. Blogging is free. You can actually maintain the
| blog post over time. It doesn't include 50 idiots' snarky
| comments. (That's what HN is for)
| johnvaluk wrote:
| This is common in the Enterprise and makes me wonder how many
| companies are undermined by their own accounting/billing
| departments. Typical problems include:
|
| 1) Vendor agrees to to NET 60, but begins to display warnings to
| end users on day 30.
|
| 2) We want to purchase 100 licenses in bulk, but vendor will only
| sell individual licenses directly to each user, who must pay
| using the vendor's payment system, with no exceptions or
| alternatives.
|
| 3) Vendor does not have a method to process payment for multiple
| invoices combined in one check.
|
| 4) Vendor sends invoice to wrong account at the same enterprise
| (way too common).
|
| What's frustrating about these examples is that there is no sales
| pitch needed; we've already decided to purchase the product.
| Taking our money shouldn't be the hardest part.
| chromaton wrote:
| Business idea: billing system for enterprise SaaS software.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| But then they would have to customize that and create so many
| exceptions that it begs the idea for another business idea:
| Billing system for enterprise SaaS billing software company.
| zippergz wrote:
| I have some direct experience with this kind of thing on the
| vendor side and here is how it happened:
|
| 1. Launch a SaaS app that people like, with self-service signup
| and monthly billing by credit card.
|
| 2. Continue to grow and become more successful.
|
| 3. New leadership comes in, and decides that the path to growth
| is hiring a bunch of sales people and selling to "enterprises"
| instead of self service people with credit cards.
|
| 4. The sales people start selling to enterprises and promising
| terms that not only can the billing system not support, but
| that engineering hasn't even been asked to look into yet.
|
| 5. Yell at engineering for not "supporting our sales team" and
| try to get them to fix it, without slipping other feature
| launches, and without hiring more engineers.
|
| 6. Look like an idiot to all of your enterprise customers
| because you're selling them a product that was never designed
| for their needs, and without appropriate engineering scale to
| change it.
| chris_engel wrote:
| And this is why you decouple your systems as good as
| possible. The humans in your company need to be able to just
| prolong premium times manually. When the customer pays in
| diamonds. Or you want to say thank you to someone and add
| half a year for free. Ir you decide to accept payments in
| bitcoin tomorrow.
|
| Never build the payment system tight coupled to the rest.
| Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.
|
| This should be a rule of thumb for everything.
| salawat wrote:
| I agree, but herein lay the rub.
|
| For every exception, you need someone on top of it. You
| have a limited pool of people to distribute this knowledge
| to, and the responsibility for maintaining this knowledge
| to even if that just invoves knowing where to look to
| figure something out.
|
| Overrides are tricky to accomodate, standardize, and
| organize if you don't nail dpwn the appropriate data model
| for the process.
| heipei wrote:
| Yup, this was a lesson I learned the hard way when I built
| out billing for our SaaS product. I had spent weeks
| thinking about user accounts, team accounts, subscription,
| integration with Stripe, how the UI would look, how I would
| verify VAT numbers for European customers, etc etc etc. In
| the end I threw all the code away because not a single
| customer that we had would have used self-checkout billing
| anyway, everything happens via email, purchase orders,
| billing portals like Ariba, etc. Monthly subscriptions are
| far and few between, pay-per-use is something that almost
| no customer would be interested in. Some customers actually
| wanted multi-year subscriptions, which Stripe doesn't even
| support.
|
| It's emails and spreadsheets all the way down if you're
| building a product for an Enterprise audience.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Based upon this series of postings, it sounds like the
| problems in the original tweet are the result of
| decoupled enterprise payment systems, rather than the
| opposite. As if someone somewhere forgot to manually flip
| some flag or that they paid wasn't properly distributed
| throughout the byzantine distributed system.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The GGP used the wrong term. What he describes is a
| system that is overridable, not decoupled.
|
| You are right in that decoupled systems aren't good.
| zippergz wrote:
| This is all well and good if you build your product from
| the beginning with the vision that it will some day be sold
| by sales people to huge companies. But if your expectation
| is that it will always be self service, a bunch of design
| and engineering work to make it flexible just looks like
| wasted effort. If you guess wrong in either direction in
| your early development you'll have problems. Either get to
| market more slowly because you spent time up front building
| for a future that may never come, or get to market quickly
| and deal with the repercussions later.
| ghaff wrote:
| It can be both. AWS and Google in particular (Microsoft
| was obviously always an enterprise company) started out
| the individual credit card route and I'd argue a major
| reason they've been able to grow--AWS better than Google
| modulo GSuite--is that they recognized they actually
| needed an enterprise sales force and the things that are
| associated with it.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Google has been exceedingly difficult to work with from
| an Enterprise standpoint. We spend millions with them for
| Google Workspace and I don't even know our account
| executive's name, nor have we ever talked with them if we
| even have one. Everything is done through our VAR.
|
| In the meantime I'm well aware of and speak to our
| Microsoft rep regularly, they know our business and what
| we need, and have been helping round up resources for
| upcoming projects and initiatives. It's night and day
| between MS and Google.
|
| It seems like Google thinks their products are so perfect
| and infallible that they can cut out the human element
| entirely. That may work for personal Gmail accounts and
| such but not so great when you spend millions with them.
| closeparen wrote:
| Isn't it the point of a VAR that the VAR, not the vendor,
| owns the client relationship?
| majormajor wrote:
| "Sometimes there will be bugs."
|
| Having human overrides to correct or change data is
| equally useful for just fixing what you get wrong
| yourself, as it is for special cases.
| tharne wrote:
| > Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.
|
| This needs to be a guiding principle of anyone who builds
| any sort of software.
| [deleted]
| binbag wrote:
| So who decided to get "new leadership"?
| zippergz wrote:
| The board of directors replaced a founder CEO with an
| external CEO, new CEO hired a new exec team. Edit: To
| clarify, things were going well, but the company was
| scaling and the founder did not want to be CEO of a large
| company because he wanted to mostly focus on product stuff.
| So he worked with the board to bring in a "professional"
| CEO.
| driverdan wrote:
| I agree with you but it turns out billing is a hard, unsolved
| problem.
|
| Basic monthly SaaS subscriptions charged automatically to a
| credit card? Simple. Selling physical products with a shopping
| card system? Harder but plenty of existing systems that do it
| well. Anything else is surprisingly hard, especially at
| enterprise scale with the level of customization that
| introduces.
|
| IMO there's a good startup opportunity for a no code billing
| system that is highly customizable, auditable, and testable.
| Seeing the level of customization that's often needed I don't
| know if it's even possible.
| mattmanser wrote:
| _Basic monthly SaaS subscriptions charged automatically to a
| credit card_
|
| Even that's no simple anymore.
|
| If you're in the EU, there's new laws around subscriptions,
| so you have to be able to handle a customer being forced to
| renew their subscription by re-inputting their security code.
|
| So now Stripe (not their fault really) has a ridiculously
| complicated paymentintent pathway that's worse than paypal,
| forcing you to send users to their site, plus you have to
| write a whole pathway for if a subscription gets flagged for
| renewal.
| hinkley wrote:
| > we've already decided to purchase the product. Taking our
| money shouldn't be the hardest part.
|
| Oof.
|
| I recall one occasion in a small retail store years ago where I
| got so frustrated at being ignored by the employees, despite
| already knowing what I wanted and I just needed someone to
| fetch it from the back. Eventually I held my wallet aloft and
| asked why nobody here would take my money.
|
| Shut up and take my money, indeed.
|
| There's also the uncomfortable situation where the management
| model at a company assumes that every sale is the result of
| customer service, and any time you sell yourself they have to
| wrangle the system while you stand there watching. I suspect
| that more companies do this than I think, and some salespeople
| are doing the wrangling without alerting me to their activity.
| They are just much better at passing for normal than some other
| places.
| Animats wrote:
| _take my money_
|
| One thing retail consultants do is to watch people checking
| out and note the obstacles. A classic problem is checkout
| clutter - impulse buy items at the checkout getting in the
| way of putting merchandise on the counter. In stores without
| carts, checkout clutter reduces sale amount, because
| customers subconsciously don't want to reach the counter and
| have no place to put the stuff. The Gap, which got this,
| always had big, clear counters. Bed, Bath and Beyond doesn't
| get this.
|
| _Eventually I held my wallet aloft and asked why nobody here
| would take my money._
|
| I had an experience like that decades ago, in a large J.C.
| Penny in New Jersey. I'd just moved to the area and was
| buying a whole set of linens, pillows, and towels in the
| middle of the day. So I had an armload of merchandise stacked
| above my head. I reached a counter in the multi-floor
| department store but there were no staff around. No one on
| the whole floor.
|
| I saw a phone behind the counter, so I dialed 0 and got
| someone. I told them I was at the checkout in Linens and
| there was no one on the sales floor.
|
| Several minutes later, about six people showed up. Not
| clerks. The store manager, some junior people, and a grey-
| haired executive in an expensive suit who was deferred to by
| the others. By now, there were two other customers lined up
| behind me. The manager sent off some of the junior people to
| search for the missing clerk, and they came back empty. The
| store manager looked scared. The grey-haired executive didn't
| say a word to his people. He just unlocked the cash register
| and handled the transaction himself. He did two transactions
| before someone was found to take over.
|
| I suspected I had just seen the end of some careers.
| leafmeal wrote:
| I wonder if they would have ignored you still if you politely
| asked for help. Otherwise, I can understand your frustration.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| I have heard similar stories from customers who switched to us
| from Okta once Okta IPOed and ignored small self-service sign
| ups. I wonder if something similar will happen to Auth0 which is
| (was?) mainly a self-service sign up developer focused company.
|
| (disclosure: worked on a competing product to Auth0 as
| acmelogin.com)
| axlee wrote:
| Sometimes it can be something as stupid as the invoice ending up
| in the accounting department's spam folder. Happened to us with
| one of our services.
| xupybd wrote:
| We had this with Sendgrid getting our invoices blocked.
| Sendgrid is no good for delivery of anything other than
| marketing.
| tharne wrote:
| Looks like Salesforce and Heroku have decided to embrace the
| "Oracle approach".
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