Ask HN: Are there fewer companies selling software now?

#1

Post by curiousgeek » Sun, Apr 24, 2016, 12:53 AM UTC

If you look at the software technology landscape over the last 8-10 years, you find many innovations coming from companies that are using software to solve specific business problems: search, advertising, social networks, media and communication (I am talking of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Uber and the like). The needs of these companies outgrew what commercially available software could do, and they were forced to develop in house solutions.

Since most of these companies do not sell their software per se (Microsoft being the prominent exception) and maintain their position in the market through other means (network effects mainly), they see no harm in open sourcing their work.

But if the bulk of software innovations are coming from such companies, what does it imply about the state of the industry then?

It has already led to a peculiar situation where programmers perceive the best jobs to be in companies that do not sell software at all!

Re: Ask HN: Are there fewer companies selling software now?

#2

Post by karterk » Sun, Apr 24, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

Here's another way to look at it: Facebook, Google & Twitter sell their software to advertisers that allows them to reach their target audience. Here "selling" is actually a service.

Uber is mostly a software company - the cars are owned by the drivers. When you pay for a Uber ride, you're infact paying a part of it to the software which helped you find the ride.

Apart from that, there are huge swaths of enterprise software companies in every industry/domain you will probably have never heard of. Some of them are even billion dollar companies.

Re: Ask HN: Are there fewer companies selling software now?

#3

Post by throwaway7774 » Mon, Apr 25, 2016, 9:25 AM UTC

karterk wrote: post #2

Here's another way to look at it: Facebook, Google & Twitter sell their software to advertisers that allows them to reach their target audience. Here "selling" is actually a service. Uber is mostly a software company - the cars are owned by the drivers. When you pay for a Uber ride, you're infact paying a part of it to the software which helped you find the ride. Apart from that, there are huge swaths of enterprise s…

Yes I used to work for Wisetech Global. This is such a company. Recently floated on Australian Stock Exchange.

Re: Ask HN: Are there fewer companies selling software now?

#4

Post by afsafafaf » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 11:26 AM UTC

Many do sell software. Google is a major software provider. However, it is things like Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education, for example. The famed buzzword: software as a service. More and more people are paying monthly for software. There's also a lot of software being sold to companies for their work - B2B rather than business to consumer.

As was famously said a few years ago "Software is eating the world."

Even traditional software companies with on-premise licensing rarely send CDs nowadays.