Directi
Poll: Where do you work?
161–170 of 197 posts
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#162Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
>are significant web operations. How are they significant: by the profit they bring, by the market share or by the investment made by the company? Personally I never associate Microsoft with the web. It's either desktop OS or Xbox.
hotmail is the most popular web based email in the world, internet explorer is the most popular browser in the world, bing wich also powers yahoo accounts for about a quarter of searches in the US, and ten there is windows live, azure, skydrive, etc. Much bigger than most significant web operations imo
Hot mails losing customers. Ie is losing Customers. Bing isn't profitable.
Ten years ago, sure. Bit now? Really? Microsoft?
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am almost certain that non-web software brings in much more revenue than web software. There is a lot of niche WinForms stuff out there from no-name vendors that rule a given industry and companies pay a lot of money for that, and that's not even counting revenue from office suites, operating systems, financial management, and other desktop software that sits in every business. There are a few glaring exceptions li…
Oh, absolutely. Before my current job I had no idea of the sort of money that corporations would throw at enterprise software if it filled an need. We have an enterprise product in a under-developed market; in the first six months we pushed prices up literally 1000 fold without any drop in interest. I've observed this even in competitive markets. Enterprise is a seriously seriously big money spinner; you're looking a…
Our company charges $250k. Per CPU.
Yes, I didn't believe it either.
And this is just one of the many line items.
According to VC, some of our bigger customers didn't take us seriously until we charged the money they were used to paying.
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#165Sigh, these poll options seem to confirm to me just how myopic many HN and startup people are about the software world. Believe it or not, there is a LOT of software that gets written that either is not "web", or related to a startup. Additionally, the people that write it do find the content at HN relevant and interesting. I found myself at a party in SF on New Years at an apartment that housed a startup as well as…
Would you wager there is more software written that is not web related and that it collectively makes more money than the stuff that is?
Just some personal observations which are anectdotal, but neverthelss give a hint:
More than 2/3rd of the software companies our (web-related) company is collaborating with provide services which are not web related, they might use port 80/443 for webservices but not more.
Casual observation of people around me reveals that almost no-one uses web based software at work. Instead all these companies they work for have invested their budgets into small, medium or large desktop or mainframe packages.
At least 20 of the devices lying around the table I'm sitting at now are stuffed with embedded software. Somebody built these, someone else put a price tag on them.
While it might be equally difficult to develop your customers when selling noWeb (hey!... quick, register domain...) software, the contact with the customers is closer leading to high retention. Moreover it's easier to server them well because you have more methods than just A/B testing to reveal the impact of changes. On previous jobs writing desktop/server-client software I never had the idea that web-based software would fit the customer better.
At the same time I use a lot of web-based stuff without a monetizing strategy, meaning, they charge me nothing.
2ct.
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#166No one here works at Apple? No wonder iTunes is so bad on Windows.
I think rule 1 of working at Apple is you don't talk about working at Apple. Also rule 2, iirc.
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#167Does someone want to just conduct a google spreadsheets poll?
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#168Wow, I didn't expect so many (max right now) votes for Non-web company. It'd be nice to hear more about these companies for a change. Who are you guys and what companies are you running?
Freelancer. Working from Europe with web startups in the US. MS stack only.
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#169Academia.
Re: Poll: Where do you work?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, absolutely. Before my current job I had no idea of the sort of money that corporations would throw at enterprise software if it filled an need. We have an enterprise product in a under-developed market; in the first six months we pushed prices up literally 1000 fold without any drop in interest. I've observed this even in competitive markets. Enterprise is a seriously seriously big money spinner; you're looking a…
Would you recommend working for enterprises to find out what sort of software they need, or can you just ask them?
The way I have found works is this; find a consultant who charges a lot of money to go and do X at a company (and who has a lot of business).
Figure out a way for a company to do most of X itself with some software whilst still leaving some "wrapping up" or auditing for consultants to do.
Convince consultant to come onboard with their expertise to help develop the software (revenue sharing deal). He/she becomes a ready made sales person once launched.
Price product at fraction of the cost of getting consultant to do the work (i.e. instead of 100K - price it at 10K).