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by kbos87 155 days ago
As a technology company scales up, making great software becomes one of a hundred things the company needs to do right in order to survive and grow. Doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely essential, but so is having a strong GTM machine, finance competency, operational rigor, HR, and a long list of other essential functions.

It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.

1 comments

> It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.

I'd be a little bit careful with this claim:

The fact that small companies can have such opinionated opinions without going bust is to me a sign that in particular for software development (but I don't claim that this is transferable to other industries) small teams/companies do have an efficiency advantage.

Many hypotheses can be formulated why this might be the case, like

- software industry is less regulated

- writing good software as the company's product requires a lot less collaboration between many stakeholders than what is necessary for producing other types of sellable products

- in software, "having a smart, though opinionated idea" is of a much bigger advantage (also for the company) than in other, more established industries

- ...

> other, more established industries

Tangential, but companies have been routinely writing and selling software since at least the 1980s, and longer depending on how you draw the line. That's roughly half a century.

At what point will being "less established" stop being an explanation for the way the software industry works?