[walolla]

Hi, I personally don't have a lot of experience regarding this topic, but I've had some observations and heard opinions on this topic from other people.

From my understanding, the more "serious" the industry is, the less cool new alternatives will be there. As an example, software for cashiers in a lot of countries is still running on windows 95, just because it was once developed and then, nobody bothered to update it, think of new features, etc. Public transportation systems, especially ticketing, if the country/city won't invest in upgrading, it won't happen. You can also think about more hardcore industries (chemistry, machinery, etc.).

But it's incredibly hard to get into these things, "don't fix what's not broken" is a pretty good reason for rejecting new ideas, but of course it all depends on your location, ability, expertise and all these good things.

I'm sorry for a very broad response, hopefully it can give you some thoughts, sorry if not.

[walolla]

Come to think about it, my friend was thinking about doing something for some city in Czech Republic regarding public transportation. From what I heard, it's doable, if you have enough proof, that you will actually solve a specific problem, something like, upgrading the payment system, so people don't have to buy tickets and could use their phone instead, making an app for tracking busses with accurate waiting times, stuff like that.

[bruce511]

The problem with this sort of software is two-fold.

First, if the target customer is public money (ie govt at dome level) then you run into procurement layers. Unlike business govt can't just have sn opionion on the best solution and buy that. Specs have to be written, tenders awarded, qualifications checked. It's far from a simple process.

The second hurdle is that, it's immediate scale. It's an all or nothing solution. All the bits need to work flawlessly, at significant scale, with custom hardware, in various locations (or worse, in this case, moving vehicles. ) All with unreliable connectivity.

It's a large, complex system with a million edge cases. The programming part is easy, it's the rest of everything that kills you.

Yes, projects like this are possible. But they are wicked expensive to pull off, and require an exhaustive specification, and a very long buying process.

[walolla]

Yeah, that's for sure, I guess you just have to look for the right institution, maybe make some friends. But overall, brace yourself for a long and rough process.

[kingkongjaffa]

At a manufacturing company I once worked at they had and old windows 98 plugged into an old label printer, and the software wouldn’t work on newer machines so they just had that computer turned on 24/7 ready to print labels.

[moooo99]

This is super common. There are still many Windows95/98/XP machines in use in manufacturing environments. The control software often hasn’t been upgraded in ages and the company that made the equipment often doesn‘t exist anymore. But what are you gonna do? Throw away a 10M€ piece of equipment because you’re not getting windows updates anymore?