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So, first of all, I love Excel. I think Excel is the most incredible piece of shrinkwrapped software ever sold. I often joke that I don't have any tattoos but i

So, first of all, I love Excel. I think Excel is the most incredible piece of shrinkwrapped software ever sold. I often joke that I don't have any tattoos but if I got one, it would be the excel logo. At least, everyone thinks I'm joking: I'm actually somewhat serious. My argument is not that these tools are bad, or that there's absolutely no market, or that it's fundamentally impossible. My argument is that this market represents a trap to the kind of people who start technology companies: it looks very shiny and appealing to people with the exact psychological makeup to launch technology companies, and that makes it harder for them to see the challenges. For every Excel there are a 1,000 Lotus Improvs. For every Ruby on Rails there are a thousand Google App Inventors. For every Hypercard there are a thousand Runtime Revolutions. For every IFTTT there are a thousand Yahoo! Pipes (and I'm not really sure if its fair to call IFTTT 'successful'). The linking feature of technology entrepreneurs is they are people who see problems everywhere that can be solved with technology. They are also generally 'generalizers' or 'lumpers' (which leads to other antipatterns: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html). These are necessary preconditions to being successful in this line of work: identifying problems, classifying them as tractable with existing or adjacent-possible technologies, generalizing disparate-looking issues into something solveable with one approach. But almost no one else thinks like this. The stereotypical tech startup founder's favorite toy as a kid was lego. Now, lego is a popular toy. But most people when they get legos build whatever was in the picture on the box. Lego almost went out of business around 2000. They turned it around by getting aggressive on IP development and licensing that does some of the imagining for you. Let's say you could invent the ultimate 'non-technical person app-maker' tool. It's a magic helmet. You put it on, imagine the software feature by feature, and then it 's in your Dropbox, seconds later. Most people would have absolutely no use for this helmet. This becomes really clear if you do a lot of consulting. People have the most insane descriptions of their problems and really have no idea what they need. It's sort of like Henry Ford's "if I'd asked the customers they would've said they want a faster horse". In technology we've seen this a million times. The most famous examples are probably why didn't GE or IBM own the photocopying industry, or why didn't IBM own RDBMSs before Oracle got out there. The classic explanation of this is the Clayton Christensen model: the new product threatens existing revenue streams and the company's internal culture protects them. As a quick aside, I think there are a lot of issues with this bit of Silicon Valley religious orthodoxy: The Innovator's Dilemma i think has a lot less explanatory power than we generally accept. There are many, many markets where successive waves of technical development been captured by market leaders. The largest shipping company in the world by TEU capacity _or_ ship count is A.P. Moller-Maersk Group. Founder Moller-Maersk bought his first ship in 1886. This is the ship: http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/48/68/db/4868dbcbadb6eb91222e77b80535d12f.jpg http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/48/68/db/4868dbcbadb6... Not only did these guys survive the crazy waves of disruption that have hit the shipping business recently, they started with a break bulk _steamship_. Diesel, containerization, automated ship management...they're the dominant player in international shipping. 130 years later. IBM owned 100% of the technology, theory, and experience in the RDBMS world then. They could have charged whatever they wanted for it. It was no threat at all to their existing database business. It could have expanded it above or below. Same with photocopying. IBM didn't have a large segment of...crummier...document duplication? The problem in these cases is the fail to understand what customers need, and to explain it to them. It's much more basic. But it also gets at the broad Silicon Valley disdain for 'marketing'. Marketing is both incredibly difficult and incredibly important. Packaging up a new, abstract concept in a digestible way that makes people change behavior is as important to driving the adoption of a new technological solution to an old problem as engineering. Anyway, I'm getting really off-track and burning up my Sunday afternoon here. The short version of my point is: It's easier to make non-technical people technical than it is to make non-problem-solvers problem solvers. It is _insane_ what 'non-technical' people manage to get done with Excel, if they have the correct problem-solvey mind. Physics majors who end up as analysts at investment banks and build incredibly complex modeling and information-management tools in Excel. But if you are the kind of person who can clearly identify an issue and envision a reasonable set of tools to solve it, there are tons of technical people around who can help you solve it, and if you want to learn yourself, its generally not that hard to get started. The typical technology entrepreneur gets a job doing _literally anything_ and is surrounded by things that make them think "jesus christ! I can't believe we're still doing that X way! We should have a system that takes the foos from the foo queue and automatically bar-izes them..." And they are limited by the speed at which they can build software. Their implementation speed can not possibly keep pace with the tons of ideas they have! But imagine if...instead of solving the specific problem with the foo queue...they solved _the problem of solving problems_! Then they wouldn't need to build a messy salesforce to address the foo queues in this small backwards industry, they would just use a no-touch sales strategy to sell directly to teams who will bring the domain experience to solve any of these problems themselves!

somedudetbh 10y ago
(HN made me split my comment) This is why the marketing pages for even the most generic products in the world almost always talk more about 'solutions'. Like, companies don't even know they need a database. They know that they need something to keep track of products. They know that they need to keep track of customers. They know that they need to keep track of resources, inventory, etc. Customers think in terms of 'screens', not the fact that these are all fairly small things built on top of very complex database software. So you start out inventing the RDBMS or the...SAN storage fabric...durable event queue...whatever it is. But you can't sell it to companies until you explain that no, it's a customer relationship manager. No, it's a way to store all your digital assets. It's a way to capture all your customer interaction data so you can make your digital marketing more effective. It takes an enormous amount of work to go from 'well-engineered technical solution to a general problem' to 'thing people will buy'. Imho, this was one of Marc Benioff's most brilliant moves: the company is called salesforce dot com. It's for your salesforce! If you have a salesforce, get this. We make CRM. Salesforce, of course, is really just a little lego box of hosted database configurators and form-builders, search engines, form hosts, etc. It's kind of like a cloud Microsoft Access that runs at larger scale, but that product would've fallen flat on its face (in fact it has, several times. the most elegant of these was probably Dabble DB) because no one wants a cloud-hosted form-builder + a database. They want a CRM system you don't have to install. They want to see the pipeline view, the contact view, etc. _on the website_. Not a video presentation where a guy at StrangeLoop shows how easy it is to make a Todo List. It's an old dumb airport business book cliche to say "customers don't want drills, they want holes." These tools tend to be more like trying to sell customers a modular motor-and-battery-and-gear train set that can be used to create any tool: a drill, a saw, a sander..._they're all just battery-driven small motors with different gearing and tool-holders!_ So, the really messed up and interesting part is that the difference in the sort of 'consumer surplus' if you will between "cloud-hosted form-builder + database" and "cloud-hosted form-builder + database + we already made the contact-entry form and the pipeline view" IS FRIGGIN HUGE. No one will pay for the cloud-hostable database + form-builder. Or within epsilon of no one. That's also 99.9999% of the work. TONS of people will pay for the same thing with the contact form and the pipeline view ("the CRM system"). This is known as "The Software Industry". It's a completely messed up place! You see this all the time on HackerNews: commentors complaining that YC/A16Z keep investing in "things that are just skins on a database" instead of "hard tech". It's because no one pays for hard tech anymore. Operating systems are not a business. For decades, they were a multibillion dollar industry, but now they exist only as a loss-leader. Oracle survives because they sell the forms on top of the database (Peopleware, etc). HDFS, Kafka, HAProxy, Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Linux, Memcached, are all free. MIXPANEL costs tons of money. The venture capital industry essentially exists now to exploit this huge bizarre situation: it costs a very small amount of money to see if you can add the last 5% to the collective pile of software that's free to make a very large amount of money. It wasn't always like this, but it is now. People will point to cleantech funds and health care investments, etc. but as of now, the total return on all invested VC with IT subtracted out is 0. The entrepreneur's tendency is to want to build the free 95%, but the economic return is in the last 5% you can charge for. Tableau is also very interesting. I'm curious how people are using it in practice. In my experience, there are generally tons and tons of business people who say things like "i want to see the X and Y correlation blah blah blah which customer bought this that also went to one of our events..." and they have no ability to answer these questions. So they pay Business Objects Microstrategy or some big BI vendor to build a 'business intelligence' system...70% of the cost is consulting...and they end up with a handful of fixed reports and no ad-hoc querying. Then they hire some sort of programmer-with-a-different-title to write reports. Alternatively, they keep dumping the data into Excel and some clever 'non-technical' person muddles through using macros to clean it up, some combination of index/match/offset to prepare it, and pivot tables to make the final reports. My curiosity about tableau is, in actual, real-world deployments, how ad-hoc are people's queries really? Also, how do they handle what used to be called ETL? It seems like an ongoing and challenging problem. It would be relatively easy to build a friendly-if-limited query and visualization platform on top of perfect data, but there is no perfect data in the world. In my experience, getting to the point where you can do ad-hoc queries on transactional business data means 90% of your resources will have been spent on ETL-ish problems, and about 10% on the 'fun part'. But Tableau is obviously killing it so they must have found some magic combination of the right amount of query flexibility and manageable data...management. I haven't like, talked to their sales people or used the product in many years though so I'm not super familiar with where it is now. OK LONGEST COMMENT IN THE WORLD OVER NOW!!!

somedudetbh 10y ago

(HN made me split my comment) This is why the marketing pages for even the most generic products in the world almost always talk more about 'solutions'. Like, companies don't even know they need a database. They know that they need something to keep track of products. They know that they need to keep track of customers. They know that they need to keep track of resources, inventory, etc. Customers think in terms of 'screens', not the fact that these are all fairly small things built on top of very complex database software. So you start out inventing the RDBMS or the...SAN storage fabric...durable event queue...whatever it is. But you can't sell it to companies until you explain that no, it's a customer relationship manager. No, it's a way to store all your digital assets. It's a way to capture all your customer interaction data so you can make your digital marketing more effective. It takes an enormous amount of work to go from 'well-engineered technical solution to a general problem' to 'thing people will buy'. Imho, this was one of Marc Benioff's most brilliant moves: the company is called salesforce dot com. It's for your salesforce! If you have a salesforce, get this. We make CRM. Salesforce, of course, is really just a little lego box of hosted database configurators and form-builders, search engines, form hosts, etc. It's kind of like a cloud Microsoft Access that runs at larger scale, but that product would've fallen flat on its face (in fact it has, several times. the most elegant of these was probably Dabble DB) because no one wants a cloud-hosted form-builder + a database. They want a CRM system you don't have to install. They want to see the pipeline view, the contact view, etc. _on the website_. Not a video presentation where a guy at StrangeLoop shows how easy it is to make a Todo List. It's an old dumb airport business book cliche to say "customers don't want drills, they want holes." These tools tend to be more like trying to sell customers a modular motor-and-battery-and-gear train set that can be used to create any tool: a drill, a saw, a sander..._they're all just battery-driven small motors with different gearing and tool-holders!_ So, the really messed up and interesting part is that the difference in the sort of 'consumer surplus' if you will between "cloud-hosted form-builder + database" and "cloud-hosted form-builder + database + we already made the contact-entry form and the pipeline view" IS FRIGGIN HUGE. No one will pay for the cloud-hostable database + form-builder. Or within epsilon of no one. That's also 99.9999% of the work. TONS of people will pay for the same thing with the contact form and the pipeline view ("the CRM system"). This is known as "The Software Industry". It's a completely messed up place! You see this all the time on HackerNews: commentors complaining that YC/A16Z keep investing in "things that are just skins on a database" instead of "hard tech". It's because no one pays for hard tech anymore. Operating systems are not a business. For decades, they were a multibillion dollar industry, but now they exist only as a loss-leader. Oracle survives because they sell the forms on top of the database (Peopleware, etc). HDFS, Kafka, HAProxy, Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Linux, Memcached, are all free. MIXPANEL costs tons of money. The venture capital industry essentially exists now to exploit this huge bizarre situation: it costs a very small amount of money to see if you can add the last 5% to the collective pile of software that's free to make a very large amount of money. It wasn't always like this, but it is now. People will point to cleantech funds and health care investments, etc. but as of now, the total return on all invested VC with IT subtracted out is 0. The entrepreneur's tendency is to want to build the free 95%, but the economic return is in the last 5% you can charge for. Tableau is also very interesting. I'm curious how people are using it in practice. In my experience, there are generally tons and tons of business people who say things like "i want to see the X and Y correlation blah blah blah which customer bought this that also went to one of our events..." and they have no ability to answer these questions. So they pay Business Objects Microstrategy or some big BI vendor to build a 'business intelligence' system...70% of the cost is consulting...and they end up with a handful of fixed reports and no ad-hoc querying. Then they hire some sort of programmer-with-a-different-title to write reports. Alternatively, they keep dumping the data into Excel and some clever 'non-technical' person muddles through using macros to clean it up, some combination of index/match/offset to prepare it, and pivot tables to make the final reports. My curiosity about tableau is, in actual, real-world deployments, how ad-hoc are people's queries really? Also, how do they handle what used to be called ETL? It seems like an ongoing and challenging problem. It would be relatively easy to build a friendly-if-limited query and visualization platform on top of perfect data, but there is no perfect data in the world. In my experience, getting to the point where you can do ad-hoc queries on transactional business data means 90% of your resources will have been spent on ETL-ish problems, and about 10% on the 'fun part'. But Tableau is obviously killing it so they must have found some magic combination of the right amount of query flexibility and manageable data...management. I haven't like, talked to their sales people or used the product in many years though so I'm not super familiar with where it is now. OK LONGEST COMMENT IN THE WORLD OVER NOW!!!