When software stops caring

How consumer software is falling into the enterprise trap

Consumer software and enterprise software are very different beasts. In the enterprise world, the relationship isn’t with the user, it’s with the buyer (in the consumer world, these are the same person, but in enterprise, they’re often not). It’s also harder to switch solutions in the enterprise world (impossible if you’re not the buyer, but even if you are the CIO, it’s difficult to change providers). This means that in the enterprise world, user experience doesn’t matter as much. It just has to be good enough, not so terrible that there is a revolt or the solution stops working.

But in the consumer world, user experience is everything. Consumers are fickle and lazy, it’s usually really easy to move to something else, and there is a lot of competition. You are on your toes every day and you have to continually earn your users. So, these apps tend to be better to use and better maintained - bugs get fixed quickly.

But there is a new class of applications emerging from the big tech platforms that’s somewhere in the middle. And these apps are starting to show signs of worsening user experience for the same reasons. These are apps like mail, mapping, messaging, productivity, and storage that are “need to haves” for the platform but aren’t really core to the revenue producing business model. These applications are somewhat like enterprise apps in that it’s hard to use other solutions without switching platforms (to varying degrees). They can’t be discarded completely by the company, but investing energy in them doesn’t yield new revenue or users in an immediate or direct way, so managers are not inclined to invest more than the bare minimum. Just like enterprise software, as long as the user experience isn’t too terrible, it’s fine, and the impact of any incremental investment is indirect at best.

There are good people working on these applications, and bugs do get fixed. But if a crash bug sits around for a few months, well, “no one is leaving the platform, we’ll get around to it”. Or often the backlog of minor issues is so large that, realistically, it’ll never get fixed, and the application just develops friction and hassle. There are sometimes reworkings of the application design entirely, and sometimes these do make big changes, but in general, the effort of moving billions of users isn’t really worth it to the business, so the apps tend to become very static.

This isn’t to call out any particular application or company, or to cast aspersions. This isn’t about personality or culture, or even the people involved. It’s about structural incentives that come from the situation. If you’re wondering why some of these application experiences seem to be slowly getting worse, this is a good part of the reason why.