None of these are particularly interesting to me. Seems like an observation-based list, based on what's currently trendy.
Products I Wish Existed
11–20 of 434 posts
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#12+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…
The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (and often multiple different copies for each SaaS the company is trying to use to substitute for just writing the software themselves).
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#13+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…
ERP is hard. VERY hard.
It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity created for lock-in purposes.
A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have their own source control version control systems. Why? They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that ecosystem. So they don't know how bad it is.
Most ERP implementations i've come across make little use of automated testing as well.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#14Are there other rundown like this? I appreciate the concept more than the content.
Less focused on business ideas and more on digital tools, but I wrote something similar a month or so ago:
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#15“ function that dramatically improves lots of people's quality of life. Examples would include eyesight and hearing. For example, many people start to get blurry vision in their 40s, due to a variety of factors including the mix of proteins in the lens of the eye causing hardening and potentially the muscle holding the lens aging. Could a simple approach like rapamycin droplets in the eye reverse aspects of aging and therefore eyesight? ”
Yeah, I’ve heard about the protein buildup problem for twenty years now. Hopefully, someday...
Here’s an August 2000 article from the NYT that discusses the problem:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/health/reading-glasses-as...
Well into the 21st Century, and I must say I’m a little disappointed. After that second DARPA Grand Challenge, I’d have said “no way we don’t have self-driving cars by 2020”
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#16+100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS s…
* I'd love to see that as well
* At the same time:
- A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there
- A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized software. I'm not saying they're right... ;)
- I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or more business process / transformation project. And the actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided by the business transformation part.
And when a company views ERP as a technical/IT project, it is most likely to not end well (small scale example: Sally in accounting refuses to change and insists that the new fancy software, on-prem or SaaS, do things the way she's done them for 2 decades in Excel, because that's "how their company does it"... no matter how inefficient or outdated they are. If you're seen as an IT project, it's your duty to accommodate Sally and now you're building the same thing over and over, compromising any value in your new ERP, SaaS or otherwise. If you're seen as business transformation project, you have some chance to make a difference and make things better...]
- Therefore SaaS would reduce FAR less effort in ERP than many techies (including myself) feel. Basically, you'd still have a consulting company come in to (try) to do business transformation so your internal processes actually accept and match the SaaS processes; build interfaces; and then maintain and support.
Disclosure/example: I'm in consulting part of IBM, and while I'm currently on a legacy ERP project, my colleagues in "Cloud/SaaS" (i.e. "let somebody else host it for you") side are no less busy than before. Mind you, they are on average providing higher value services, so that's a plus :)
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#17Elad Gil is a really smart investor (his list of Unicorn investments is probably larger than any other angel), but -- with the exception of (11) and (12) -- this doesn't strike me as a very ambitious list.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
ERP is hard. VERY hard.
It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity created for lock-in purposes. A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have their own source control version control systems. Why? They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that ecosystem. So they don't know how…
Automated testing is becoming the norm, but I'd agree that otherwise ERP developers, on average, are either unaware, or simply not able to utilize most of the tools and practices from the wider market.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#19> 1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers.
[Boundless](https://boundlesshq.com/) is a startup that is tackling this exact problem through automating the entire "employe(e/r) of record" process.
Re: Products I Wish Existed
#20Correct me if I'm wrong, but No 5 already exists?! I'm from Europe. I have an app on my phone that shows me the pollution in the city I am. I check on it every time I'm in different places. It's called AirVisual. I installed it from google play, I have android.