A Crystal Reports consultant was in town recently for a big migration
project from Crystal to Business Objects XI for the port. I was supposed to get
some face time with him at the end of his gig, so that he could enlighten me
about how best to connect my .NET framework to the back-end BO server. This guy
is smart and is a really nice fellow to boot, so I felt like I could ask him
some candid questions about Crystal Enterprise/BO. Here's a re-cap of our conversation, with
some of the more salient parts of our discussion:
So, how can a software company like Business Objects release a product
that is so very expensive, and is so defective?
Guru: Well, the
latest version represents a lot of work to integrate Business Objects with
Crystal, and they've done a good job. Many of the bugs are minor and are related
to the UI, and the underlying codebase is vastly
improved.
Well, but we're still experiencing lots of bugs. Doesn’t Business Objects realize that it's hurting
them to release defective software? Why not just release a version every 3
years and insure that it has no major bugs and is well documented and it tested,
instead of releasing a new version every year?
Guru: Well, they've
had to keep ahead of Cognos, so they've had to release software to keep ahead.
They’ve released too quickly, in my opinion.
I really think the
software community needs to put pressure on companies like Crystal to release
better software. I think the world is waking up, and the days of very expensive,
brittle software are numbered. The majority of the products I use are generally
bug free, I expect this from a software package.
Guru: Well Crystal Enterprise is a very complex piece of software. It has
lots of components [therefore, it’s bound to be more buggy]. Other vendors
release buggy software as well, just look at SharePoint from Microsoft.
I don’t mean to be so negative, but there are lots of .NET developers
like myself who have had very negative experiences with Crystal, especially in
trying to deploy and manage Crystal in ASP.NET applications.
Guru: Yeah, Crystal hurt themselves when they packaged their report engine
with Visual Studio. It wasn’t designed to be scalable.
Well, why would a company release a web application that wasn’t designed
to scale?
Guru: They shouldn’t have.
I was left with this big sinking feeling that this isn’t going to change
anytime soon. Expect an under-documented, buggy release of Crystal (BI) every
year or so. Expect money to be poured into licensing for this stuff
– unless more of the people involved with the software can demand a
change.
For the people who buy this stuff (the CTOs of the world) the bugs are just
expected. They’re used to spending lots of money for buggy enterprise
software and I’m not sure they’ll ever really care. Perhaps if someone could
show them the true cost of implementing an enterprise reporting
solution, they’d start to demand a change. On the other hand, they’ve already
budgeted the quarter of a million or so for the software, so what do they really
care?
The report designers aren’t going to complain about the software because they
have a vested interest in keeping Crystal around – their jobs. In
fact, you could argue that the more buggy the applications are, the better they
get at navigating the bug-field and the more secure their jobs become.
Sadly, it seems like as developers, we’re the only ones who are
upset about buggy, brittle enterprise reporting software.
We’re the ones who have to come in on the weekend
when Crystal crashes our servers. We’re the ones who
spend three days getting the software setup, when we could be
doing real work. Yeah, it’s all work for us too, so
why should we care? For one, we could be doing
other things, but additionally, the high total expense of all this can
cost us in our jobs. Every dollar that a company spends on expensive software
licenses is a dollar that they don’t have for paying for other software that
could make your job better, consulting services and even your
salary. It’s in your best interest to save your clients or
your employer money.
When I put my idealist hat on, I do think days of big expensive software are
numbered. Better designed software will win out in the long run, but in order
for this to happen, the environment needs selection pressure. We’re
starting to see the industry trend toward acceptance of open source and more of
a focus on how software works, and this will continue. Hopefully this slow
climate change will trickle up to the people who make these decisions.
And, I
know it’s a crazy idea, but how about asking : “You know that $250,000 piece of
software I just bought from you? Um. Does it work?”
-Brendan