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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

#291

Post by terryjsmith »

_lx4l wrote: post #108
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.

We have an "internal systems" team at my current company to solve this problem. The product manager for the team knows everyone and keeps tabs on what's being done that could be automated. It's not used to replace people (at least it hasn't been yet) rather it's used to allow the team to stay the same size and scale up their operations to meeting the growing business demands. I think many companies could benefit from…

This is great. How do they deal with the on-going maintenance of the tools they build? Do they move to the main product team or does the internal systems team continue to maintain them?

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

#292

Post by Jestar342 »

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…

I worked for EDS from late 90s to early 00s and SAP was _everywhere_. Projects were scoped and framed as "how can we fit this into SAP?" - and not "how can SAP help this project?"

SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP.

Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.

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

#293

Post by luckylion »

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?

I think it has to be a startup, i.e. recently founded, hyper growth, usually VC-funded.

A company worth a lot of money that has existed for 80 years isn't a unicorn, it's just a company worth $1B+.

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

#294

Post by willhslade »

huffmsa wrote: post #253
lenkite wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP's ugly green, old style-UI screens are wonderfully optimised for data-entry. You can be ultra-fast . It's like VIM. It's like driving at 300 mph. Its all the new fangled dumbed-down, web-ui's that is sheer crap and leaves your head scratching. Well..the old UI's were coded by old-school, C programmers who started their career in the 70s and 80s. They even wrote a multi-process Erlang style kernel to back the appl…

Saw a big write-up somewhere about this. It's easy to learn the muscle memories for various patterns on a text only UI, and you can become extremely fast. But almost no one is fast with a mouse based GUI

Excel.

Indeed.

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

#295

Post by encloser »

bluedino wrote: post #276
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…

A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. Many people end up abusing customizations to the point of trying to emulate their old system in the new one, and nobody wins.

I feel like you could replace "ERP implementation" with "business transformation project involving vendor software" and have a new Law.

The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."

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

#296

Post by atom-morgan »

nojito wrote: post #261
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.

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

Is that unique to Basecamp or does it apply to all similar software? I haven't Basecamp all that much. What exactly do they do to ensure this?

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

#297

Post by gruez »

chii wrote: post #75
Swizec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined

> Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!

You assume that on average, each person buys 1 pair of laced shoes per year. How realistic is this? Maybe affluent consumers in developed countries can afford 1 pair of shoe per year, but I doubt it's affordable for consumers in developing countries (where most of the world's population are). Even in developed countries, how many of those shoes have laces? Many women's shoes don't have any laces, for instance.

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

#298

Post by ehnto »

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…

A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think.

Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation.

I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.

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

#299

Post by czechdeveloper »

RickS wrote: post #57
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.

For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise , the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills. The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 gue…

It's also funny how nowadays such bird detection would possibly be just another few hours.

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

#300

Post by webmaven »

gonzo41 wrote: post #80
MattGaiser wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this. A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easil…

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.

Several years ago I came across a pile of interesting-to-me US government data that consisted of scanned PDFs of paper forms (some filled out by hand, some with a typewriter, more recently with a computer). The paper forms change in layout and level of detail a few times over several decades, there are hundreds of sub-schema variations within each time period (yes, that means that a particular variant might have a single record from 1983, a dozen scattered over time, or thousands across several decades), some variations are due to a simple category misspelling, others are more substantial.

Some of the scanned forms have marginal notes (probably okay to ignore these), but I've noticed some cases where the form had prefilled data crossed out with handwritten data replacing it.

Please let me know if a system exists that can deal with this idiosyncratic mess and coaxed to produce structured data of some sort without basically using MTurk behind the scenes. I would be interested in re-releasing the data into the public domain.

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