Have you ever done enterprise contracts? A lot of huge companies won’t touch smaller products because they can’t guarantee what they want. These are complex negotiations with a lot of a la cart options.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to work with what they already invested millions in. each customer is different there. most enterprise products are ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad for business on either side.
From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with corporate customers with SSO?
What normally happens:
* Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT
* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID
* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.
* You wait for a response for a month
* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed
* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.
* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.
* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
Totally OT, but I love your typo "a la cart". It makes me think of an early 20th century greengrocer with a cart of vegetables and fruit trying to appear more sophisticated by saying he's selling things "a la cart".
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?