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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

#311

Post by corpMaverick »

irrational wrote: post #19

I work for a Fortune 150 manufacturing company. When I started working here there was no IT group at all (it was all outsourced). The CEO and President said many times that we were not a software/technology company and that would never be a core focus. Nearly 2 decades later, technology is now listed as number 2 of our top 5 core focus. We are working on converting all contractors into full time employees. The IT gro…

I have learned to avoid companies that don´t understand that they are a software/technology company. You can't scale up if don't automate. IMO, It is just an excuse to do mediocre technical work.

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

#312

Post by rorykoehler »

luckylion wrote: post #293
rorykoehler wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+.

When is a startup not a startup anymore. Are Facebook and Google still startups?

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

#313

Post by joenot443 »

dvdhsu wrote: post #27
_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.c…

Great article David! Thanks for taking the time to include some screenshots and videos. This is the kind of company-funded-blog-content that we all love to see.

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

#314

Post by NikolaNovak »

chasd00 wrote: post #285
NikolaNovak wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You're absolutely right - you're buying software, a set of best practices, workflows, and a proven way to implement and use them. 2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible. 3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vani…

that happens a lot with enterprise software, too much customization and you end up painting yourself in a corner or run into roadblock after roadblock of platform gotchas. I do SF implementations these days and have seen it go great and have seen it turn into a total nightmare. however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many d…

>>not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well.

Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly, and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it.

However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are worthwhile the disruption and pain, and from that perspective it "went well" - the business objectives were overall met, whether it be capabilities or speed or reporting or integration/centralization or headcount or complexity reduction, all of it ultimately boiling to money at some level...

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

#315

Post by colinmorelli »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #308
risyachka wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, software is not a creative industry. Creatives always took home a small fraction for many obvious reasons. Software solves hard problems it is constantly evolving and updating so you need lots of personnel to maintain it, with a lot of knowledge so it will never be cheap, and great engineers to create it in the first place. Take away a bunch of artists nothing will change. Take away a bunch of critical…

> Take away a bunch of artists nothing will change. . Take away a bunch of critical software - the world will stop. Is that right? Is there any evidence that a society can exist without art? There’s an overwhelming body of evidence that suggests it can do so without software.

Not agreeing with GP, but I think your comparison here is a bit flawed.

Art is a broad concept - it doesn't suggest any specific form or delivery. Software is fairly concrete - it has to be run on a computer.

A more appropriate comparison would be art versus scientific research, or art versus engineering. I think that's a more interesting question, to which I would say: perhaps we could survive without either, but I can't imagine we'd thrive without both.

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

#316

Post by peterlk »

A friend has described these to me as "dark matter companies". They are everywhere, and they permeate industries, but you never see them. They work in small, unmarked offices outside of the standard tech hubs. Some of these companies make billions, but you've never heard of them, and they'd like to keep it that way.

In other cases, they're small companies that own a market that's too small for a large competitor to go after. $10m/yr will not make VCs happy. But it will certainly pay nicely to a team of 12.

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

#317

Post by crimsonalucard »

youdonthavekids wrote: post #248
njharman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"SQL doesn't"... you are correct, SQL can't figure out how much tax you need to pay across 9 tax jurisdictions. SQL can't tell me the best way for my warehouse picking robots to move across the floor based on the layout of the warehouse and what others products are being picked right this second plus over the next few minutes. The list is really endless of what SAP will do and SQL won't. It would take decades to repl…

Sounds like SAP does custom App building. Do they use a custom underlying database technology as well?

Would it be equivalent to contracting some software system to a a company that would build the system using SQL?

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

#318

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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.

There are tons of things that are worth the time to automate but aren't because they aren't worth the additional cost to sell the automation.

Just because something can be done automatically doesn't mean companies can magically discover it and pay for it. You still have to sell it to them.

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

#319

Post by yellowapple »

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.

This is why it's important to tackle this from both ends:

- From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future

- From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world

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

#320

Post by thisisnico »

jimnotgym wrote: post #171
thisisnico wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also alternate vendors of ERP. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for example. At my current shop I manage INFOR VISUAL ERP.

...Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, all entirely different products for different sectors. Then there is Netsuite, Sage (lots of different products), SAP Business One (small SAP), Oracle ERP, JD Edwards...plus 1000 niche providers who are often migrating to NAV rather than their own product. It may be a shock to a FAANG, but the ethos is very much, 'move slow and don't break anything'. 10 year old versio…

Windows is popular in enterprises for like, a million reasons. As a Windows Systems Administrator, The entire Windows ecosystem is built around business and business processes and management.
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