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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

#111

Post by lainga »

tlb wrote: post #59

The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it. What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented. It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most…

Maybe that analogy would be accurate if you could make new and pleasing music out of hundreds of small samples of other music, and also 90% of the musicians were used to either getting their samples via torrent or picking one album and playing it in an orchestra of 5,000 for the next 40 years

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

#112

Post by hnick »

_bxg1 wrote: post #43
crimsonalucard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

Because it's your business logic. And your GUI builder. And your tax system. And your legal report generator. Etc.

Yes I've heard that often businesses mould themselves to the software, rather than the other way around. The argument is that decades of exposure means that, if not entirely optimal, it at least represents competent processes for running a very large and complicated business. Rolling your own multinational tax compliance in SQL would be madness.

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

#113

Post by njharman »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #39
_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…

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

Because the ERP solution comes with a gaggle of sales people, sales eng, and bizdev folks to convince your co's decision makers that it is best thing since butter.

SQL doesn't.

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

#114

Post by Eugr »

MattGaiser wrote: post #94
gonzo41 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first one can be done with teseract ocr pretty cheaply. I think a lot of people just don't know how much software can do. You just need to standardize the form and then there's a human data validation step in there.

The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using te…

There are commercial OCR software packages that can do it. FineReader is one example (and it's been around for ages).

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

#115

Post by beckingz »

thelibrarian wrote: post #72
crimsonalucard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

Why would you use an ecommerce platform instead of a regular SQL database?

When you're doing eCommerce.

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

#116

Post by hnick »

tlb wrote: post #59

The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it. What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented. It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most…

Good software is a force multiplier than enables everything else to be more effective.

A traditional mindset applied to software results in the businesses we often see people complaining about. "We make the product but Sales gets all the money!" and that's very similar to your metallurgists. Code for hire as a product of labour. It takes an army of people to sell, to advertise, to make me want what it is you have (just like with music).

But a business who looks at software as complementary will see the value. A dollar spent brings many dollars back, just indirectly. It enhances the machinery that's already in place, and allows it to do entirely new things.

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

#117

Post by Aeolun »

abiogenesis wrote: post #71
cambalache wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.

You skimmed a small part of SAP’s market? Like, a specific niche that you built a better tool for?

I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.

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

#118

Post by MattGaiser »

pascalxus wrote: post #69
MattGaiser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs. A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a…

but how do you find these small businesses that need these types of things?

Lots of cases really are obvious.

One of my friends lives in a rural area where most businesses never got beyond the Church bulletin board and the phone book.

Suddenly they became cottage country and none of the local businesses were getting any business as they wanted to see websites or at least written down phone numbers and they don't use phonebook.

Take a walk through the small business section of your town and see who has a website. If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify. Lots of desperate closed businesses who will take a gamble on that right now.

The reason tech has not arrived is that there is no person standing in front of them making it extremely basic for them.

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

#119

Post by thdrdt »

Kinrany wrote: post #26

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.

Maybe it's also because some software sounds dull and old fashioned so people don't talk much about it.

I am into ERP, WMS, TMS and BI software. You don't hear much about this on HN but worldwide it's huge because it is what logistics run on.

Most of the time it's also old software and I believe there is a lot of money to be made. For example machine learning can be used to estimate goods that have to be purchased to keep optimal stock.

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

#120

Post by travisjungroth »

_bxg1 wrote: post #60

I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to dea…

I was going to go home to the US and visit one or two companies per day that I felt were underserved. This was supposed to be early March. Didn’t go as planned.
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