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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

#391

Post by NikolaNovak »

_bxg1 wrote: post #23
ivalm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…

And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind

You'd think so... I thought so once... but again, perhaps not necessarily - ERP is NOT their core competency.

I.e. HR & Payroll legislative rules and best practices, business & organizational process transformation etc, are not what Google Engineers and IT necessarily have experience in, and if they allow hubris to override that fact, it might not go great.

Internets indicate that Google uses Oracle, Apple uses SAP.

This info may be outdated - for example, Facebook claims they built their own ERP just recently; I do wonder what that "backend database" part is though, or how much HR/Pay/Finance, as opposed to inventory/datacentre management, is custom: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/how-facebook-does-it/

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

#392

Post by kradroy »

_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 work for SAP and it's surprising to me that not even other engineers in the Bay Area have heard of the company despite its campus in Palo Alto and their sponsorship of the "SAP Center" in San Jose. Do you file expenses? You probably use SAP Concur. Do you order office materials or equipment? You may use SAP Ariba. Have you taken part in interviewing a candidate coworker, or have you done yearly career goal planning? You may have used SuccessFactors for that. And this doesn't even count SAP proper's offerings (HANA/S4, etc).

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

#394

Post by MattGaiser »

gknoy wrote: post #384
MattGaiser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify So ... they then pay you for helping them get on Shopify? I can see how one might be able to convince a business owner that they could benefit from using Shopify, but is there room in there for a third party to sell configuration services? Please forgive my being a noob with regard to Shopify. Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the busin…

> Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own

You are vastly overestimating their computer savvy in many cases. Lots of small businesses barely have email. So even with the self onboarding option, many businesses need help.

But what I was thinking was more in line with this:

https://developers.shopify.com/custom-development

I am admittedly not a Shopify developer. I just have friends who make decent coin doing it while not being very good coders in general.

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

#395

Post by helij »

brundolf wrote: post #22
NikolaNovak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small ( I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".

SAP goes deep. It goes as far as to the factory floor when the technician is measuring if the piece is within tolerances and from Mitutoyo caliper sends the data into some kind of database, or something ;)And there it is, on a screen from 1994, SAP proudly on the screen. It's everywhere.

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

#396

Post by youdonthavekids »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #317
youdonthavekids wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

I can't even grasp how you can be so far off the mark. I kind of assumed most people on HN would understand large software platforms and how rolling your own is often not a worthwhile investment. Maybe you should just create your own IDE when you want to write new code or maybe develop our own version of Word when you want to write a letter. How about develop your own email system too?

As for the database, traditionally it would run on Oracle with connectors for various other DBs but recently there has been a push towards the HANA in-memory DB mainly to push oracle out of large accounts I think.

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

#397

Post by youdonthavekids »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #283
youdonthavekids wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I mean I guess you can throw all that functionality in a bunch of triggers but that would slow down your database to a crawl every time one record updated.

TO rebuild SAP's manufacturing and finance capabilities into your own system would take many many years and cost large sums of money, you are then stuck supporting a custom solution forever and you'll be forever behind your competitors, your industry trends and whatever new tax or other legislation that needs adding to you system.

This isn't nodejs and MySQL mate.

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

#398

Post by youdonthavekids »

NDizzle wrote: post #353
SamuelAdams wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I guess you can throw all that functionality in a bunch of triggers but that would slow down your database to a crawl every time one record updated.

Have the triggers publish to service broker!

Brain dead response.

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

#399

Post by chris1993 »

shp0ngle wrote: post #86
imgabe wrote: post #46

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are gi…

I like the TV Series “Rotten” on netflix... it basically shows every food, fruit, meat, vegetable, you name it, is actually heavily controlled by cartels and mafias. I had no idea there were mafia cartels that had wars about avocados .

Avocados were a big driver of crime in New Zealand pre-COVID. So high-value that orchards were being raided and stripped overnight. I can fully imagine violence around this.

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

#400

Post by hadlock »

I was surprised to find out one of my coworkers had been maintaining the point of sale (POS) machines for a local chain of comic book shops, running hypercard (yes, that hypercard) since the 1990s. The POS machines would sync their databases via write ahead logs over dialup
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