A word of advice to my baseball card friends. If you see something posted to the “Aggravation” category on this blog, it’s going to be a legendary post. Also, NSFW, lot’s of angry words. I know, it’s a personal flaw, I’m working on it. If you’re offended by f-bombs, I’d suggest finding funny pictures of cats instead of reading this post.
What in the holy hell is with software “solutions” these days? Not a single thing is built using any sort of normal technology, with a customer or client in mind, or with any understanding of basic web terminology. No, you’re PAGE is not a fucking APP. No, I will not implement your API if you call basic content “modules”, normal fucking navigation links “tabs” and “buckets” and basic features “advanced”.
I swear, everyone has lost their fucking minds. In some insane rush to make huge stacks of internet money, software companies that should have legitimately folded a decade ago are making “web apps”, selling them for $300,000 per LICENSE and laughing all the way to the bank.
At work, and keep in mind I work for a company that MAKES software, we’ve spent way too much money on systems that supposedly help with everything from employee records to IT systems management to creating and tracking sales for our business development people. Every single fucking time we do, we throw out the old system, on which millions of dollars were spent getting it running, climb aboard the Fail train and ride it all the way into the side of “Does this work with our system?” Mountain.
I was working with one such piece of crap today. The sales tool to be exact. I’d say which one but the things I’m about to say about it would probably get me sued so lets just call it Retarded3000. This “tool” is used to track sales leads, conversions and resources. You know, the things that PEOPLE are supposed to do. 50 years ago, it was called a Roladex and a fucking filing cabinet. If you can’t “sell” something face to face, and remember the persons name, or what company they work for, guess what? You’re a shitty sales person. You should be looking for a different job. I hear there are great opportunities in the soy farming industry.
This piece of crap costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, is very aggressively limited in it’s licensing, making you pay for every person accessing it, and after using it for a while our sales people said “hey, we love this thing, we should do everything related to our software INSIDE it!” The big problem with that is that it’s not meant to be used that way. Yes, it has an option for “client” access. As is fucking trendy, it’s called a “Customer Portal”. I’ve got your “portal” right here! The “Customer Portal” is basically like the employee side, only without ANY options. You can only see whatever is “public”.
The problem with this public customer portal is that, and hold onto your hats, it looks like a 3rd party application. No shit. You’re paying for client side software, what do you think it’s going to look like? A toaster? No dipshit, it looks like it’s a piece of software. Apparently that’s where I come in. I’m supposed to “customize” this. And by “customize” I actually mean “read the 500 pages of documentation to find this gem.”…
“You could create a custom skin for (name removed) using a custom CSS, but to implement it you would need to recreate every one of your pages using (other thing you have to pay for) pages, which you can make look however you like. There would be a lot of work involved and you would need to have an understanding of CSS and HTML code.”
That’s IT?!?! Those are the directions?? Are you fucking kidding me! The directions, in a nut shell, say “it’s really hard, why bother?”. Not only that, but the preceeding statement about recreating ALL your pages re-enforces the idea that it’s simply not worth it.
Listen asshats, if you make a piece of software, taut it as “customizable” and having a public facing option, then tell me that it’s “really hard” and “a lot of work”, you should be beaten for including it in a feature list anyway. Also, to every executive who you court and who buys this crap and expects their team to implement it, let us take a fucking look at it first. Trust me, whatever they told you at the “breakfast seminar” you went to is so full of BS that they could have started their own fertilizer company. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is 100% customizable. At the very core, there are always fundamental things that can’t be changed. The only thing that comes close, off the top of my head, is probably WordPress, and that’s about 75% customizable. You can edit just about everything, but the essential core files that run the software need to stay pretty much intact. Customizing a piece of software on a per-customer basis is like asking Microsoft to change the splash logo for Word for every business it’s sold to. No, no, it’s not Word 2011, it’s Jimmy’s Pool Supply Company’s Write-Master 6000!
Pro-tip: If you’re buying software, make sure you see a demo, not only of what YOU see, but what your clients could see. Then, and here’s a brain-buster, ask questions about it and make them ANSWER YOU. The phrase “of course, everything is customizable” is not and I repeat, NOT an acceptable answer to “can I make the background blue”. Make them fucking show you. If they didn’t show you how it worked, and you can’t understand it, don’t expect that your “people” will just magically be able to figure it out. That’s not what you pay us for. I’m not here to decipher ancient hieroglyphics, piece together the dead sea scrolls, determine the validity of a lost Leonardo painting, or figure out where the fuck is option X in a program written by mindless fucking sea monkey.
Oh, and doubly and triply FUCK YOU to any company that creates their own mother-fucking programming language for the program to be developed in. I kid you not. Once I found the option where my customization could potentially go, it says this:
Warning: Any CSS or HTML will be removed when the page is published”
Oh, no… no, no, no you didn’t. You just told me in the manual that I could use CSS. Oh, wait, that’s on the normal pages. I can’t use HTML and CSS on the normal pages. I can COMPLETELY REDO everything with SpecialCustomAssHole Pages and use it there, but you just told me not to fucking bother, because it’s “hard” and hard things aren’t worth doing apparently. Heaven forbid I have a deadline of yesterday.
I’ll leave you with this juicy morsel of retardedness. I think it explains the whole thing in a nutshell:
To add your own logo to the top left corner of (removed) you will need to:
– Upload the image into your Documents objects.
– Create a custom App
– The image will not show up yet, you have to activate it. To activate go to: Setup > Customise > User Interface
Then check the box next to ‘Enable New User Interface Theme’. You will need to be a System Administrator to do this.
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