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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

#341

Post by Axsuul »

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.

So what you're saying is it's not because they have a good product?

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

#342

Post by cosmodisk »

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 wrote a piece of code last year in probably no more than a few hours.Showed it to a few guys in my team.Instead of sharing my excitement,they were like "if you run this,what are we going to do then?". She was right,if I'd do it, the size of the team would be reduced by half.But then,what I'd get? Do I get a bonus the size of those employee's salary for 6 month? No.I'd get a grand or two and instead and a pat on a shoulder,while those guys won't find a job for momths.So what's the point?

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

#344

Post by andrewflnr »

ci5er wrote: post #273
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 doz…

Thank you for that. (I'm not being glib.) EDIT: I think your learning style and mine are much different. I remember when I had to do a biological proposal to DARPA (I guess I didn't have to), I went to the University of Texas bookstore and got every book they had on molecular biology - and read them over two days at a Starbucks on the deck (beautiful day, but hot), and then wrote the proposal and had the interview. (…

Whatever you are, you're not broken if you can actually process 30cm of books in a few hours.

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

#345

Post by jlj »

wolco wrote: post #339
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.

Have you seen your local software? It is rarely about making great software.. good enough. Open source tries to make great software. Does the best job.

When good enough software solves the right business problem, it frees up resources to solve the next most important business problem. Good enough software runs many great businesses.

The one unicorn I worked for had so much cash to spend, there were at least 3 teams of 8-10 engineers on the same floor trying to solve similar business and infrastructure problems with different combinations of open source software.

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

#346

Post by recursive »

cosmodisk wrote: post #342
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 wrote a piece of code last year in probably no more than a few hours.Showed it to a few guys in my team.Instead of sharing my excitement,they were like "if you run this,what are we going to do then?". She was right,if I'd do it, the size of the team would be reduced by half.But then,what I'd get? Do I get a bonus the size of those employee's salary for 6 month? No.I'd get a grand or two and instead and a pat on a s…

The point is getting that thousand bucks before someone else does. Or to make the company efficient enough to survive in a market where the other company's already efficient.

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

#347

Post by jmilloy »

_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 clicked on the link not having heard of ERP or SAP and expecting to have my mind blown, too.

But, isn't that software almost the reason why computers and databases and programming happened? To help businesses with there boring business stuff, like inventory and orders and accounting?

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

#348

Post by ido »

Aloha wrote: post #214
tinco wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Promoted to the level of his incompetence perhaps.

Both hp and SAP are absolutely gargantuan companies (try guessing how many employees each had by the end of his tenure- unless you actually know I'll bet you'll underestimate it). They are also old (for computer related companies at least) and have lots of products for lots of clients.

Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.

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

#349

Post by vlucas »

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…

I worked at NetSuite for a little over 4.5 years (2 years before the Oracle acquisition), and it also blew my mind how much companies were spending on NetSuite customizations. It's a huge world out there for sure.

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

#350

Post by phamilton »

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 don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th.

Perhaps the difference is that musicians don't change a completed work. There is no maintenance cost. A song doesn't become useless and obsolete if you don't pay the musician to continually improve it.

For static software, I'd expect it to look more similar. How much of Tetris went to the people who wrote the software?

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