[zcvosdfdgj]

The only challenge to setting up the ultimate competitor to Sage/Quickbooks is that it's so mind numbingly dull.

Yes, the dullness of the topic is why no one has bothered to enter the market and compete with the $3 billion Intuit, or the $1.5 billion Sage. It's just too boring for them to bother with that kind of money.

You're fing kidding right?

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the 17,000 pages in GAAP have something to do with it? Or maybe the 3000+ counties.. or the long list of county/city/state/federal rules and regulations? and not just accounting rules, but employment taxes, credit card processing, invoice generation, etc, etc, etc.

I think you don't understand the complexity of the topic and don't know the full feature-set of sage/quickbooks, and that's why you think it's simple software.

[jacobn]

I think he understands it rather well - it's "complex simple software".

You can think of any software as consisting of a set of problems of varying degree of "difficulty". Sort them in ascending order and plot them. This graph will give a very tell-tale signature as to what you're facing.

B2B / enterprise / call it what you will software has an infinite number of individually easy but collectively mind-numbingly painful problems. Yes, a lot of that bs comes from laws/rules created by "others".

"Interesting" software has a small-ish number of very difficult problems and then a manageable number of easy ones. These are the type of problems where you can take a small team of very smart people and really knock it out of the park. They are most unfortunately very few and far between.

Social cat photo software I can't speak to. I'm certainly not implying that it's in the "interesting" bucket...

[ansgri]

Most people are thinking too narrowly of B2B, and while it may be true that business logic and accounting are dominating in number of installations / volume of sales / whatever, some very unsexy businesses (road toll collection, what could be worse!) do want most sexy science and technology. Significant fraction of computer vision studies is dedicated to vehicle recognition and classification.

[zcvosdfdgj]

No, he definitely doesn't understand what quickbooks is. He says 10million loc is an indication it has gone "horribly wrong". That tells me he doesn't have the vaguest idea what the feature set of quickbooks is.

I've been programming for 15 years, and have personally used sage for 7 years. 10m loc is definitely within reason for the number of features the app has.

If he doesn't understand WHAT the software IS. Then how can he sit there and say what the level of difficulty is.

He DOES NOT KNOW. because HE DOES NOT KNOW what quickbooks is.

[0x0]

I parsed his "something's gone horribly wrong" as to mean "wrong with the accounting laws in this country", not "wrong with the software development".

[jacques_chester]

Law is complex because the world is complex. We're talking about "essential" complexity; it exists in the domain and it can't be wished away.

[Bill_Dimm]

I have to disagree. Law is complex largely because politicians need to feel like they are doing something. They make changes so they can claim in their next campaign that they've improved things. They make changes to benefit their likely donors/voters. The cruft keeps piling up and it rarely gets wiped away.

Consider tax-advantaged retirement savings. Why do we have: traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, 401k, Roth 401k, and 403b, all with different requirements and different benefits? The need to have a reasonable amount of savings when you retire is universal, so why this complicated mess? Why are two people doing the same job at two different companies able to save dramatically different amounts based on whether or not their employer chooses to offer a 401k? Why force every taxpayer to do a 10-line (or whatever it is) calculation to determine eligibility to for an IRA just so we can prohibit a few rich people from having a benefit (hint: it would be a lot easier for everyone to make it universally available and just bump the rich people's tax bracket by a hair if you really feel the need to wipe out the pittance in tax savings that they would obtain). This isn't necessary complexity, it is pointless stupidity that we all suffer for (except for the accountants that gain employment from it).

[jacques_chester]

Sure, that's one source of complexity in legislation.

But really, seriously, the world is complex. Every day people stumble on combinations of circumstances that have never occurred before in human history. Some fraction of those people get into an argument about what happens next. Some fraction of those go to a judge and ask her what the answer is.

The judge takes the existing principles, cogitates a bit, then extends the case law to cover the new scenario based on analogy with older scenarios.

This creates a new piece of law. It's never been seen before. But it might turn out to have profound consequences.

Before switching to computer science, I studied law. It's complicated because people are complicated.

[coopdog]

I think ther are some sexy B2B problems, ie problems that can solved with technology rather than business solutions that use a tiny bit of software.

Analytics is pretty huge. Companies will pay big dollars for profitable insights into their data, queue distributed computing and machine learning. In machine learning and AI there are a massive number tasks being done by unskilled temps that could be automated away, for example data entry, basic research, report interpretation (back to analytics).

Then there's whole field of taking almost any piece of enterprise software and just giving it a decent/usable user experience, using sexy Web tech, html5, etc.

I think the only thing unsexy about b2b is that you'll never be famous in your friends eyes, ie you'll be the guy who made their accounting software 30% less frustrating rather than the guy who created the latest local cat photo montage social network