[_xnmw]

Brilliant. Bravo. Well said. Look at the companies in any recent YC batch and it’s mostly just a long list of ridiculously simple SaaS ideas that anyone who knows how to use a spreadsheet doesn’t need. It’s amazing that so much money and talent in the West is dedicated to expanding rent-seeking and financing, instead of actual innovation or economic productivity. No wonder we have a housing crisis and a stock market decoupled from reality.

[sbarre]

And yet many of them succeed? So unless you think all their subscribers are stupid, they must see a reasonable value exchange.

In the large enterprise where I work, I've often argued against building our own in-house XYZ with the position "do we want to be in the business of building and maintaining XYZ or do we want to focus on our core business?"

In some cases it definitely makes sense to build something yourself, but in plenty of cases, paying an external company a recurring fee (that is probably less than the ongoing capital you'd spend doing it yourself) is absolutely the right business decision.

Plus, I've rarely seen one-off non-core internal "products" at a company actually be better than the product that a specialized company can offer.

User experience matters, the tools and software your employees use should be held to the same quality bar as what you offer your customers.

And let me tell you, internally built software rarely comes close to that bar.

[Vegenoid]

In many cases, I would not say that the subscribers are stupid, but I would say that the company's decision to use the software was stupid. Often (usually?) the decision is made entirely by people who aren't involved in the day-to-day of the work that the tool will be used for.

The people who will be the ones using the software the most would oppose the decision if they were involved, but they weren't. They begin using the software, and it becomes clear that there are numerous problems - either bugs or, more common and insidious, incompatibility and inflexibility. But now there are high-status people in the org that have reputation staked on the success of the adoption, so they continue to shove a square peg (or just a bunch of shit) through a round hole. The software becomes embedded in the org's operations, and the costs to disentangle it become high. This is how software that does not improve things can be "successful".

I have seen this happen over and over. It is of course the fault of the org for allowing this to happen.

[mrgoldenbrown]

The internal products I support may not be as fancy looking as the specialized commercial products, but it will be designed for our exact workflow and internal weirdness. IME users will generally prefer the product that has only the 7 fields they need, and already "knows" that on alternate Tuesdays the TPS reports get printed in landscape, because of that silly local council rule.

[sbarre]

The counter-point here is that 10 years passes and processes have changed and needs have evolved and everyone's still stuck using that old internal app that was built by people who are no longer at the company and no one wants to update it because it's toil and there's no budget, and so processes are cumbersome and artificially complicated because everything has to go through that app.

Case in point at my company there's an internally-built ITSM app that requires a user to select "Approved" no less than 8 times across 4 screens to approve an internal request.

My point here is that there will always be edge cases that disprove the rule, so yes you're right, but are you right most of the time? I doubt it.

In my 30 years working in this field (and 10 of those years were spent helping companies deal with poor internally built apps), the majority of internally-built applications at companies that aren't modern software companies (i.e. most companies) age very poorly, have poor internal support and little to no technical health budget, have terrible user experiences, and are generally disliked by most employees who have to use them.

Particularly in these times when everyone can compare the tools they work with to the stuff on their phones or laptops that they use every day. It's an unfair comparison but it's still there. The expectations for interfaces and software usability have increased faster than most companies can manage for their internal products.

[_xnmw]

> unless you think all their subscribers are stupid

Ah, there’s the capitalist’s circular religious belief, if it’s profitable it must be good, and it’s good because it’s profitable.

Except some of the best things in life are not profitable, and some of the most profitable models are not good (such as Facebook/Google’s privacy invasions and the ad-driven model).

To think that subscribers pay money because they see a “reasonable value exchange” is to be completely blind to the incentives behind many big ticket software purchases. Managers pick IBM/Microsoft/Slack just so they can’t get fired for failed boondoggles or because they don’t care about anything except maintaining the status quo. Startups choose certain SaaS tools because they’re part of the same VC-funded slosh-it-around party. There’s just so many millions to be made by selling to fly-by-night startups or clueless bureaucratic enterprises or government that you don’t actually need to be innovative or useful to “make it” in todays tech world. You just need to know how to play the game. There are exceptions and true innovators of course, like OpenAI or Apple or AirBnB but those are rare.

[sbarre]

> > unless you think all their subscribers are stupid

> Ah, there’s the capitalist’s circular religious belief, if it’s profitable it must be good, and it’s good because it’s profitable.

Not sure how you got to that conclusion from my words, unless you're projecting a metric ton of your own bias into my post.

Sure you can turn this into a big complicated discussion, but I still say that for most companies the decisions is "is it a better choice for our company" and that can absolutely involve spending money but also focus, experience, employee happiness, future flexibility and more.

> To think that subscribers pay money because they see a “reasonable value exchange” is to be completely blind to the incentives behind many big ticket software purchases.

Can you be more condescending? Honest question.

The value exchange is not the only reason but it is the primary reason most companies (and people) spend their money (at least in my experience and observations).

It doesn't actually need to be more complicated than that in a lot of cases.

I don't disagree that what you're saying certainly happens as well, but you make it out like that's always what happens and I don't believe that's the case.