181–190 of 285 posts
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multiple of what? there is maybe one software company trading above 30x revenue - palantir. many companies growing at 20% trade at single digit revenue multiples.
Unqualified it almost always means earnings (profits).
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Excel spreadsheets have little to no validation logic that you're actually getting a good result, unless you have a secondary check (most spreadsheets are structured as "single entry" accounting, so lack the checks) A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions: https:/…
You are taking my comment way too literatlly. The point is not that people will be using specifically Excel, but that most business only pay for software because it is the tool that gives them the most power to automate their processes. They don't need high availablility, they don't need standards compliance, they don't extensive automated tests, they won't need cloud engineeers and SRE... all you need is some tool t…
Some stuff in companies might be similar, but there's a lot of things that people use every day, in a lot of different ways, and the software needs to work correctly regardless. You can't just drop it like a hot potato once you've built processes around it.
As always, the first 80% takes 20% of the time/effort, the last 20% takes the other 80%.
Is it AI or just the market realizing that some of these companies were ridiculously overvalued to begin with. Here are the p/e ratios of companies mentioned in the article, after the said "pummeling": * ServiceNow - 70.66 * SAP - 28.70 * Salesforce - 28.15 * Workday - 73.16 * Microsoft - 26.53 So they range from "a bit high" to "still completely bonkers".
I would say that MS here is undervalued. They do not offer some small software package for a given business problem but the whole shebang - the OS, mail, calendar, office suite, IAM, cloud, etc. + support for each and the whole integration. You can't realistically replace that with some LLM solution (in the near-term at least) and they can use the AIs to reduce their costs which is mostly people.
Windows 11 though...
> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.
A lot of these companies are not small monthly fees. And if you’ve ever worked with them, you’ll know that many of the tools they sell are an exact match for almost nobody’s needs. So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool that they have to hammer into a circle hole. They do it because the alternative is worse. AI coding does not allow you to build anything even mildly complex…
One thing that's interesting is that their original Salesforce implementations were so badly done that I could imagine them being done with an LLM. The evergreen stream of work that requires human precision (so far, anyway) is all of the integration work that comes afterwards.
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Modern AI probably could’ve done almost all of the work for him. no way. We're not talking a standalone AI created program for a single end-user, but entire integrated e-commerce enterprise system that needs to work at scale and volume. Way harder.
I also have pretty hefty skepticism that AI is going to magically account for the kinds of weird-ass edge cases that one encounters during a large data migration.
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I guess that's technically true, because "most businesses" are sole proprietorships without any employees... but they could get by just fine with a checkbook and a note pad. But the reasons the business software sector grew far beyond Excel of the 1990s is because of the inherent limitations in scaling solutions built by business analysts inside of Excel. There's a vague cutoff somewhere in the middle of the SMB mark…
Uh, no. The main reason the software sector grew in the 90s was a particularly potent combination of FOMO, kickbacks, and strategically deployed cocaine.
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Open source doesn't implement, host, and support itself. Some of these software companies stocks are companies selling open source software.
Software developers programmed themselves out of a job. They created a huge and growing set of free, tested, high quality software in the form of open source, that can be use for pretty much anything. LLMs will automate a lot of the remaining pieces.
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There is no way you would get anything close to as good as JIRA. Your best bet with that budget would be trying to integrate an existing open source on-prem solution (not sure what that alternative is for JIRA).
> There is no way you would get anything close to as good as JIRA. It would be hard to do worse. A packet of crayons and a scrap of paper is better than JIRA.
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> holding back industry from making something truly better and more reliable. What "industry"? If you are talking about the software industry, then I'd say you are creating a circular reasoning. If you are talking about all the other things that we actually need to do and which only incidentally have become too reliant on software to do it, then see back my original point: people don't need "better and more reliable"…
If running your business to '90s standards is acceptable, sure, you can use AI to automate your manual processes with the same error rate and keep doing the same thing indefinitely. But if the competitors have real software engineers and have used them to actually improve reliability, you'll be left behind.
- A facilities management company
- A bar/restaurant with a staff of 8
- An Architecture office
- A Law Firm with 10 associates
- A day care
- A car repair shop
- A cement factory
- A family-owned hotel
- A conference/event organizer
- A video production crew
- A roofing companyThe Value of software is going down, this much is clear to most people. It will continue to demand proper engineering for its creation and operation. But AI will lead to an increase of unique one-of-a-kind systems created by very small teams. And the world will increasingly rely on these unique systems. SaaS companies need to start reading the writting on the wall, their massive valuations enjoyed when software was h…
Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool? Most Saas companies are sales companies at their core rather than software companies. And those sales people are so good that they can sell a todo list for millions.
That's not the situation we're talking about though. It's someone saying "hmm, I need to edit this picture. Can I get ChatGPT to do it?" where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it.
Similarly, if they need a tool to batch-convert a thousand images, they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool they need in a couple of hours and then running that, rather than buying a software product that can do it.
You don't need a whole dev team to build a one-off tool for a specific job, which is probably 90% of the demand for those software products. LLMs are becoming the general-purpose tool for a lot of use cases.