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Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

shankarganesh.blog

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#42

How does he go from "Zoom is great" to "Business software is so good now, that it's competing with consumer software"? His only supporting example is Zoom. Then he goes on to generalize the shit out of it which is not really that convincing. Zoom succeeded in consumer space because of COVID, period. Good for them, but I don't like people who spin stories. Even before covid I've known about Zoom for a while as some ne…

I know a lot of folks who heavily use Trello to organize their personal lives. He's wrong about Slack, though. That mindshare among people who don't already use Slack at work, and even among many who do, belongs overwhelmingly to Discord.

And then there is the massive population of people who burned their productivity with last generation's chat apps and do not dare allow chat productivity destroying software into their workplaces.

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#43
post #3

I just installed Oracle DB to help my mum with managing her recipes. It's really improved her TTT (Time to table).

wouldn't sqlite do the job just fine?

What kind of heathen uses SQLite? Praise our Lord and Saviour Larry Ellison <3.

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#44

Nice article. I'd love to see examples of people using slack for personal life. Don't know anyone who does this.

I have a private, premium slack with ~20 of my closest friends from college, which I set up in March when we all were sent home from campus. It replaces many many disparate group chats and fits our need for customizable text-and-image chatrooms, voice and video calls, and support for mac, windows, linux, android, and iOS, with machines of vastly different levels of power and quality (although it could be a little mor…

Why pay for Slack when you could setup a Discord server for free?

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#45
I found it odd that he doesn't mention Stripe which is excellent in B2B. Its true that we are using Zoom extensively and it works well. But that's just one software. Almost all of my work apps suck apart from Zoom. Especially the HR/Salary portals are terrible to use in almost all companies I have worked so far. Ex: ZingHR loads for more than 10seconds to show anything useful. The UI looks like it was made with a default styling from one of the many frameworks available online.

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't sqlite do the job just fine?

What kind of heathen uses SQLite? Praise our Lord and Saviour Larry Ellison <3.

...I do

learned it from CS50.

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#48
post #3

I just installed Oracle DB to help my mum with managing her recipes. It's really improved her TTT (Time to table).

No child was ever disowned for choosing Oracle!

That's because there wasn't anything to inherit once the Oracle audit was done, right?

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of folks who heavily use Trello to organize their personal lives. He's wrong about Slack, though. That mindshare among people who don't already use Slack at work, and even among many who do, belongs overwhelmingly to Discord.

But Trello was designed as the opposite of prevailing business tools at that time and part of that was that consumer use cases (e.g. college projects) were mentioned often in earlier examples, so it's hard to claim it as an example of a business tool migrating to consumer use. Its taken a more business first approach since the atlassian acquisition for sure, but that wasn't always the exclusive focus.

It wasn't always the exclusive focus, but I think it was always the primary focus. After all, it came out of Fog Creek Software (now Glitch); given their product history, Trello would stand out as the only consumer-focused product they'd ever released, had they actually released it as one.

As I recall the original marketing (imperfectly, I'm sure, as it's been quite a while ago now), the pitch was focused around the concept of a project management tool without the usual overheads and complexities such tools tend to bring along, something you could just jump into and start using. "And you can even use it for stuff outside of work!" might've been there also, I don't doubt it, but I have to think it would've been secondary at best.

Re: Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

#50
While I admit, the OP/author didn't choose the best examples and could have researched more. And also, there are still plenty of crappy business apps out there. (To the troll comments, neither Oracle nor SAP are modern by any account. Oracle predates the internet).

I will also say that the OP is right about this trend. If I had to pick between two equals, with equivalent SLAs/privacy/other business considerations, I'd pick the tool that's easier to use and onboard. An easier to use tool means my team spends less time struggling and more time being productive and happy!

Think AWS vs GCP. AWS is older, clunkier with a terrible UX and GCP is modern , aesthetically pleasing, gets out of your way and innovative (cloud console FTW).

JIRA is from a time before this trend started, but ClickUp is a JIRA/Confluence/Trello alternative that faster, modern and easier to use.

Notion is another great example. It's a business tool diguised in consumer clothings. It's so well designed, easy to use and massively customizable that it serves both use-cases equally well (at least for me).

While Dropbox started out as a consumer app, Box was business centric from the get go and has a really good UX. Same goes for Quip, that's an alternative to Google docs for business that was eventually acquired by Salesforce. It's UX was way ahead of it's time.

And there's Shopify! It's a dream to use for setting up an online store, compared to any of its predecessors.

So in spirit, the OP is right.

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