Sucks Is A Strong Word
I don’t know what’s more disturbing…the search term, or the fact I ended up being being number two on the Google search when I checked it myself.
Now granted…Microstrategy isn’t for everyone, but I’m going to do some deducing here. If someone is at the point where they’re that dissatisfied with Microstrategy that they feel the need to actually find a community out there to affirm and share that belief of “microstrategy sucks”…by all means…Google away. However, I do find it hard to believe that someone who has used enough of the competition (Cognos, Business Objects, SAS, etc) to have a basis for comparison would use a term quite as descriptive as “sucks”. Maybe the dashboarding capabilities aren’t what you expected…or maybe you just don’t like the word ROLAP. I might expect to find “microstrategy comparison” or even “microstrategy negatives”…but sucks?
Color me cynical…
As far as comparisons, I know this link is biased, but it does answer some question future BI shoppers might have.
After a year of working with this lousy product, I have no idea why anyone would voluntarily use it.
I have never used a product so un-intuitive in my life.
- A product that requires right click contextual menus in obscure places to do seemingly simple things.
- A product whose licensing is so convoluted I have no idea what is in compliance.
- A product that requires utilities to clean up metadata that is corrupted during normal use and development
- A product whose development GUI looks like a VB project from first year college programming course.
On a positive note, they have a fairly responsive tech support team which is good cause you are gonna need it.
I can address these one by one.
1. Sometimes it is frustrating, but with any of these types of products, there’s a learning curve. I like the fact the drill function especially utilizes the right click.
2. I think License Manager takes care of that pretty well.
3. Never had that happen yet, so you might be right.
4. I never did anything like this in my VB classes. While it might not be as “flashy” (pun) as some other products, as a developer I care about getting data and presenting it. The GUI for me is adequate…it’s not over the top fantastic, but I’m a developer, not a user…I’m impressed instead by the functionality.
Like I said, it’s not for everyone, and I’m not a sales guy.
Hey, that’s common. I receive at least 5 guys who came to my blog due to “microstrategy sucks” or “negatives in microstrategy”.
If your ranking is high in this terms, you need to weed out similar words, so that your ranking decreases.
Couldn’t agree more with your answers.
@Pissed off developer
amen to that. same reason i found this blog.
I’ve used Cognos, BO, and MicroStrategy extensively in the last 10 years. MicroStrategy handsdown is a better product. If you have issues with certain aspects of the product, post it, along with how other tools let you accomplish what you can’t do with MicroStrategy. I guarantee there is a simpler, better way for MicroStrategy to do the following. If I have to rank the 3, it’s MicroStrategy, BO, and Cognos. Cognos and BO are put together with purchased components that the metadata is a mess. Especially Cognos, which seems have a separate metadata for every damn component. And don’t get started on SQL generation. BO and Cognos don’t come close to generating a SQL that makes half sense.
The only thing Cognos has that is better then BO and MicroStrategy is their Sales team, because selling Cognos requires many creative ways to bend the truth.
As to the search terms, when I’m evaluating a product for installation onto my company’s servers, I always google for productname sucks. I’ve found out more interesting bugs, shortcomings and little dirty secrets about quality of support or pricing gotchas that way than you’d apparently believe. Sure, the end user types that would use MicroStrategy are too uptight to use a word like sucks, but the IT people are the ones whose opinions I value. When it all comes down to dust, 90% of BI users are sales drones and beancounters that don’t truly have any valid perspective on evaluating software other than whether they think it looks pretty and whether or not it’s easy for them to use.
In terms of MicroStrategy, I’ll leave out the bulk of my story and just relate the one glaring WTF that is really pushing me to drop MicroStrategy from our number 1 BI candidate down well below several other companies. I called their support folks because their Linux demo VMWare appliance is built improperly and so it breaks when you try to do some things. In the process of attempting to get me sorted out, the tech I spoke to suggested that rather than using the IP address of the VM I put localhost into the address bar of my browser, and attempted to argue with me and tell me that it would get somewhere other than my own desktop PC. Any qualified IT person (and a good many power user end user types) know that localhost always, ALWAYS points to your local machine (at IP address 127.0.0.1 or the equivalent on your setup), and will almost never even send a single packet of data off your PC if you attempt to hit that address.
That might not seem like a problem to you, but that’s such a fundamental misunderstanding of network application troubleshooting that it really just blows my mind. I like to try to believe that the managers of a support department at a software company would be able to recognize that powerful of a lack of knowledge in their employees that they would know to either send them for training or put someone else on the job. Time and time again I’ve seen BI vendors with either an utter lack of concern for that sort of issue, or that are completely managed by the type of people who would be the end users of their product, who have absolutely zero technical competence or comprehension. As the person who has to install, setup and maintain whatever BI app I decide we’re going to use, it’s just amazing to me that these companies charge tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars (often yearly) for what is essentially a support contract.
I know MY company isn’t spending 5-6 figures on an app with support that poor. In this economy, you’d think they’d be concerned about that…
@Someone MicroStrategy is REALLY trying to piss off
Sometimes when you get First line of support for the demo product you might someone who might be new to the company/job role. (Having dealt with mutiple vendors, this is very common occurrence.)
How ever having dealt with the paid support services the picture is different. they still go through a script to resolve issue. but if are usually responsive and diligent in their issue resolution. (is issue is found patches are provided. and then made sure they are patched in future releases.)
But i can tell you this while making large investment you weight all viewpoints (users/developers/admins) . Making a Judgment based one conversation/rushed judgement
means there are larger issue to look at within the organization (IT is enabler for business, not the other way round)
My advice is email support@Microstrategy.com and Sales@microstrategy.com. I am sure there will be a swift resolutions. (They are not big and slow to move, unlike their competition)
First, I’d like to point out that it is very wise of you to consider technical support in your overall BI evaluation. Quality of technical support is a critical factor to success of any enterprise software deployment and one that is often not given appropriate consideration during the evaluation process. The fact is that the high quality of MicroStrategy’s Technical Support is consistently recognized by the top industry analysts (Gartner, BISurvey, Cindi Howson, etc) as a significant differentiator between MicroStrategy and other BI vendors.
That said, the interaction that you’ve described certainly appears to fall short of our standards and our well-established track record as world class support organization. I’m confident that this experience was an anomaly and would recommend that you contact support again and request to speak with a manager. I’m sure that they will be happy to review the ticket to ensure that we resolve your current problem(s) and that we conduct the appropriate review with the engineer you worked with.
I’ve contacted support several times. I’ve been in IT for 15 years, I don’t discount someone based just one one incident. The first time I emailed them (at the suggestion of my account rep), my support request was passed along to MicroStrategy’s Asia Pacific support queue – SLIGHTLY outside of our timezone (10 hours is slightly, right?). After emailing them again to clarify that someone in our hemisphere should probably be handling the request, I was passed to a second person (the one I mentioned in my previous comment), who was unable to help me – after teaching him what localhost is, he said he had no idea what was causing the problem, and would have to setup his own copy of the demo Virtual Appliance to see if he can reproduce the problem. After not hearing from him (by the way, I still haven’t heard from him), I called back and was given to someone that suggested that maybe (she didn’t know, she didn’t have enough knowledge of her employer’s products to say for certain) the demo appliance had the entire admin section removed…because, you know, it’s so easy to demo something when you can’t even add a user or data source to demo with, and that while she had no idea how she could find that out, she’d get back ahold of me if she found out who put the demo appliance together, after asking them. I still haven’t heard from her, either. Next, I spoke to (who I was told was) the support team lead, who had (miracle of miracles!) previously encountered my exact problem! It turns out the Virtual Appliance was improperly created, and he filed an internal request to fix it BACK IN OCTOBER OF 2009, which still hadn’t been addressed or dealt with.
This means that MicroStrategy has KNOWN their demo VM is non-functional for NINE MONTHS without doing ANYTHING to fix that, AND not informing the people providing support about any of it!
That a team lead would neglect to inform his subordinates of such a show stopping issue that he himself discovered just completely astonishes me. That a company would sit on such a show stopping issue for most of a year and still claim that they walk the high road in terms of support and quality just makes me laugh.
Meanwhile, my account rep got me the link to download the actual installer for the linux edition (why the demo download page hasn’t been updated to link directly to that is beyond me, it’s such a trivial change that would eliminate all frustration on the part of potential six-figure paying customers) which I proceeded to download and was about to prep a server to test on (with as picky as MicroStrategy is about what versions of Linux they support, I’m taking no chances). Thing is, the list of supported Redhat Enterprise Linux editions that are supported CEASED TO BE AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD FROM REDHAT BACK IN SEPTEMBER OF 2009.
I asked my sales rep what editions ARE supported, and he assured me that the engineer assigned to support our sale would be in contact with me this past Friday to answer my questions.
It’s Monday. No call from the tech, no word from my account rep about that.
If this is what the industry analysts for BI software consider top quality support, they need to get out of the BI world and see how support is handled by REAL companies.