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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

#261

Post by nojito »

miki123211 wrote: post #249

Basecamp is a famous example of this. It's a pretty popular project management software, 56 employees at this point if I remember correctly, probably millions in revenue. It's a tiny, bootstrapped company, no investors breathing down their necks, no IPOs, nothing. And they're one of the few companies who actually have principles, are committed to privacy etc.

Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor.

The vast majority of companies like this have perfected the lock-in strategy to ensure that their customers can never leave.

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

#263

Post by mister_hn »

_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…

SAP was just nominated (together with Deutsche Telekom) the contractor for the official German Vivid tracking app (Covid-warn-App), just saying

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

#264

Post by drewmol »

tinco wrote: post #207
ohazi wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if t…

He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..

... or maybe it's the perfect ending?

I'm not sure about his SAP earnings, but he sold HP an 11 month CEO for upwards of 27.5M[0]. That sounds like the perfect way to end your sales career ;-)

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/business/lets-stop-reward...

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

#265

Post by bregma »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #257
piokoch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc." Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true: "A basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In tho…

Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)

Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries.

Let me guess, you live in Toronto?

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

#266

Post by ezconnect »

sq_ wrote: post #239
NikolaNovak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew…

This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because…

Some industries need your system to be certified for a software system to consume their data/services. You don't have much choice.

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

#267

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

ci5er wrote: post #228
_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've got a - maybe silly - question: Do you think that software engineers read about the business of technology? I mean, some of these behemoths (or used-to-be behemoths) of technology, like Oracle and Intel and Microsoft (Ok - everyone knows them) and Dell and Apple (mostly the 2nd one) and places like SAP (which is arguably the biggest database and logistics and supply chain (sans the EDI middle-ware vendors on the…

>I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured?

Your son and his friends know you. Your experience is lived, and real, as real as you sitting next to them. Reading books is abstract, the language can be obscure, archaic, verbose, flowery, dense, etc. Your son and friends know how to read your emotions and communicate effectively with you. An hour of your stories could likely replace dozens to hundreds of hours of reading because you can tailor your stories on fly the in a way no author ever can.

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

#268

Post by andrewwharton »

rorykoehler wrote: post #204
heipei wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, those German Mittelstand companies are the exact opposite of what's usually referred to as a unicorn. They are small to medium-size, multi-generational family-run and family-owned businesses that focus on a very narrow set of products, such as just making gears for automative applications, or ball bearings, or blades. The people working there often work there their whole life, with the understand…

Doesn't unicorn just mean $1B+ valuation?

And that hasn't IPO'd yet.

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

#270

Post by jayjader »

pif wrote: post #240
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…

Musicians write music. Developers write and maintain software. Imagine there's no Version, it's easy if you try... Really, no concept of version: you buy a piece of software as it is, take it or leave it! Either it works enough for you or it doesn't. No bugfix in the next release because there is NO next release. The musician, ehm... developer, has switched to the new shiny thing. You modified yoour environment sligh…

One could argue the comparison still holds for developers of video games - as long as the game's code is not touched upon release. Used to be the norm, nowadays admittedly seems to be disappearing.
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