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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

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Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#21

Post by ivalm »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #13
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused

That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP.

Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#22

Post by brundolf »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #13
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…

To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small (I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#23

Post by _bxg1 »

ivalm wrote: post #21
NikolaNovak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…

And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#25

Post by BoysenberryPi »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

I work in B2B software and almost all of our clients use SAP. It's absolutely massive.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#26

Post by Kinrany »

This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer.

That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#27

Post by dvdhsu »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce (https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/) that was well received on HN too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.com)

(As an aside — when we started Retool, we ourselves didn't expect the "custom internal tools" to be such a big market. As it turns out, we now have customers that spend $400M+ / year on building custom, homegrown, internal tools! While we [or any single vendor] certainly can't capture all of it, our goal is to capture some percent of it.)

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#28

Post by maxwin »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

My company is using SAP so it is very familiar to me. But before I joined my company, I have never heard of SAP. There are some good industry process knowledge that gives them an advantage and the software is good once you get used to it. But it can definitely be 10X better (there is a big opportunity to make it easier to customize or integrate with other software) . However, once you become their customer, the switching cost is very high even though there is better software in the market. That makes it difficult for startup to break into this market.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#30

Post by tootie »

MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.

I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.
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