This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Brendan Tompkins. Original Post: My Conversation with a Crystal Guru Feed Title: Brendan Tompkins Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/brendan.tompkins/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Blog First. Ask Questions Later. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Brendan Tompkins Latest Posts From Brendan Tompkins

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