One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite.
Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes.
Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception.
Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.
I've seen a couple reasons:
One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite.
Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes.
Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception.
Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.