this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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That’s fair, and I think a lot of the problems with that software was the internal developer/administrator for the software (I think it marketed itself as Open Source but was probably more accurately Source Available to customers) had taken it hostage with no one else allowed to touch it. I think it had become the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code that had guaranteed a permanent job for this guy because if he left the entire business would fall apart, including an inability to bring in revenue. Everyone knew he was a problem, except perhaps his boss, the CFO. When our companies merged they were originally supposed to join us on NetSuite (not without its problems of course but definitely better than the other software) but the hostage taker supposedly convinced the CFO that NetSuite wouldn’t be able to produce a report the CFO liked and we wound up moving to theirs instead. It was also supposed to save money by having lower user licensing costs. They brought in an outside consultant for our transition because the internal guy was too busy but then it turned out the internal guy was doing a bunch of non-standard stuff that didn’t work with the consultant’s design and the internal guy had to redo it anyways. When I left two and a half years later the company had spent millions on the transition and two different additional major pieces of software (the second replacing the first) trying to replicate what we’d had in NetSuite but was still lacking much of that functionality.