#oneaday Day 44: The Right Tools

I've spent most of my afternoon swearing at one of several proprietary software tools I have to make use of in my day job… and it just makes me wonder — not for the first time — how and why companies end up thinking using such crap is a good idea.

Since my experience over the last few years has primarily been in content management of various descriptions, what I'm talking about here primarily applies to content management and localisation systems, but I'm sure someone from another sector that is heavily reliant on software will have their own horror stories.

It seems like there's some sort of perception that in order to be "legitimate" you need to produce your own software, or at least butcher the hell out of an established tool until it's barely recognisable from its original form, runs like garbage and is more of a pain than it's worth to make use of. And, I have to wonder, with so many great "off the peg" solutions available these days — many of which are free or open-source — why?

Prior to starting MoeGamer, I worked on a number of different sites, all of which except one made use of their own proprietary content management system… or in a couple of cases, a tool that was emphatically Not Right for the Job. The one which used an established CMS used WordPress, a package with which I'm intimately familiar (MoeGamer is built on it, and prior to that I was using it for my personal blog) and respect a great deal. All the others were, not to put too fine a point on it, absolute crap.

I think the worst one I used was one of those "Not Right for the Job" situations. It was during my time at energy company SSE — one of the most awful periods of my life from a mental health perspective, but that's probably a story for another day for those who don't already know it. Initially, they made use of a tool called "Ektron", albeit a version that had been extensively modified and tweaked over the years. Ektron was shit in the first place, but all the various plugins and extensions that had been bolted onto it meant that it ran at a snail's pace as well as being a pain in the arse to use. Want to just edit a page? Good luck finding the piece you want to modify when literally every paragraph on that page (sometimes every individual sentence) is its own separate piece of content.

While I was at SSE, the company was in the process of changing over to a new CMS and revamping their website. At the time I joined, they'd already been at it for four years, and by the time I left they still hadn't finished. They'd literally hired out a whole building off their main site to try and get it up and running. And you know what? The new software (Oracle WebCenter Sites, if I remember rightly) was also a big pile of shit that also made use of this inexplicable "fragment your content as much as possible" model.

I guess there must be a reason for companies making use of such seemingly ill-designed tools, but I'm buggered if I know what it is. I say keep it simple, stupid!