Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why software stocks are getting pummelled

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 285 posts

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#171

Post by margorczynski »

paxys wrote: post #133

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.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#172

Post by lmm »

chasd00 wrote: post #139
julienfr112 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I told to my colleague that it would take less time for me to vibe code jira that it would take him to configure it. Sounds crazy ? Not so much : factor the part of jira you use (maybe 10%), the many choices and dimensions you have to configure, the time it take and the complexity it bring. On the other side, the vibe code version have only the fields you want, most of the logic hard written in code (ie epic > story…

This reminds me of all the "i could turn the spreadsheet into a webapp in a weekend" type comments. Sure, you could get CRUD and a datatable working but then a user is going to ask you for a custom field and you'll say "ok let me vibe code that, update the database, and then deploy" but the user will say "well in Jira I could just to that myself...". Then the next thing they're going to ask is some kind of custom wor…

> but the user will say "well in Jira I could just to that myself..."

> "...but in jira that was already there"

Must be a different Jira from the one I'm used to, where obvious features are never there and even if you can find the button it doesn't work.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#175

Post by ozim »

louiereederson wrote: post #110
epolanski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian tools for a client like mine (hundreds of employees) can easily cover the expense of internalizing it. It's Jira plus confluence mostly, it's not rocket science. And that's just atlassian. Start adding stuff that costs many many many yearly salaries (special software for managing inventories and warehouses) it starts making sense to prototype alternatives internally. I came to the conclusion that if it's no…

jira premium is $15/mo/user for 300 users. you're saying $50k can cover developing the app inclusive of integrations, maintaining it, providing 24/7 service and 3 9s uptime (per the sla)? don't forget compliance and security. maybe the logic is everyone can be fired and replaced with agents?

Atlassian had on premise option already.

All instances I remember seeing were neglected, not updated running on lowest amount of resources. Everyone in company nagging how slo it is but no one wanted to share budget to improve it.

So for me that experiment „it will be better and cheaper building our own JIRA” was already done. It is going to be cost center that no one will want to throw money at.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#176

Post by lmm »

camdenreslink wrote: post #162
fragmede wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. $50k goes a long way outside of the Bay Area.

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.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#177

Post by lmm »

louiereederson wrote: post #98
SimianSci wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Small Monthly Fee" is a very loaded term here. Im in the negotiations for these platforms, the price that many of these companies command for their products will very often pay the salaries of a whole software department. Add to this the quality of support being the lowest possible option above "nonexistant" and I would say the risk to these SaaS companies is real. The real benefit of these types of SaaS offerings w…

>My hot take here is that the moats previously enjoyed by SaaS companies will increasingly vanish as smaller and smaller teams can assemble "good enough" solutions that companies will adopt instead of paying giant chunks of their budget on pre-built SaaS tools that will increasingly demand more training to Onboard. why do people pay red hat/ibm for rhel? they earn pretty good margins too. to parent's point on softwar…

> why do people pay red hat/ibm for rhel?

Because the guy who signed the purchase order had a good time golfing?

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#178

Post by lmm »

rglullis wrote: post #142
zdw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with anything you say here - using a tool that lacks guardrails is fine for a lot of tasks, but if that's the only tool and used where those guardrails go from "nice to haves" to something more critical is where the problem is. I've been in ops for a long time and have encountered far too many "our IP addressing plan is just a spreadsheet with manual reconciliation". I truly wonder if Excel and all i…

> 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.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#179

Post by woodpanel »

Or it could be just the good old cyclical stock market correction after years of entire segments of the indecies growth being purely driven by software.

Of course such an angle would require much more research on behalf of the journalists for much less spotlight than what you would get for free by just singing to the tune of AI-doomerism.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#180

Post by keeda »

Sleaker wrote: post #68
keeda wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I wonder if it would be cheaper to hire a couple of software engineers to vibe-code custom SaaS apps on top of the company's existing data layer instead of paying for a hundred different SaaS subscriptions. Financial considerations aside, one advantage of having in-house engineers is that you can get custom features built on-demand without having to be blocked on the roadmap of a SaaS company juggling feature re…

I'm at a large company that is building connections between all of its different financial systems. The primary problem being faced is NOT speed to code things, the primary problem at large companies is getting business aligned with tech (communication) and getting alignment across all the different orgs on data ownership, access, and security. AI currently doesn't solve any of this. Throw in needing to deal with reg…

Totally makes sense. Turns out that a lot of what Palantir's "Forward Deployed Engineers" do is navigating these bureaucratic and political obstacles to get access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir -- which may be Palantir's real secret sauce, rather than the tech itself.
Post reply on HN