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.