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I have worked for a mail-order pharmacy and I can confirm that this is absolutely true. Our software was written in COBOL and run on an emulator for some old a

I have worked for a mail-order pharmacy and I can confirm that this is absolutely true. Our software was written in COBOL and run on an emulator for some old alpha machine. It had countless bugs, was slow (even though it had a curses-like console interface), and required the user to manually do things that no human should do. With better software we could have probably done the job with less than half, maybe even a quarter, of the staff we had (maybe 150 people). I think that some smart hackers and good managers (you need a call center and a fulfillment center so it's not a hackers-only task) could knock them over. More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags.

edw519 19y ago
"More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags." Truer words were never posted on this site. Even though this is "hacker news", it really seems like a small subset of hackerdom. Seems like every other hacker wants to write the next paradigm changing Web 2.0 social networking new media mobile app looking for a market while 7 million small and medium sized business owners would rather chew razor blades than spend one more day with their current software. People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?
- rsheridan6 19y ago
  >People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open? I think there are two reasons: Hackers tend to be male computer geeks who majored in CS or something like that, and they write for markets that they understand, so they're mostly concentrated in the same markets because they understand the same things. Even within the Web 2.0 sphere lots of markets are ignored. Here's an example of a site that serves knitters: https://www.ravelry.com/account/login https://www.ravelry.com/account/login They've been around for less than a year and they have over 100K users. I only know about them because my wife knits. They have (or had when I checked it out several months ago) essentially no competition, because the intersection of people who are interested in hacking and knitting consists of very few people. IIRC it was written by the husband of a knitter. Second, dealing with businesses is kind of daunting. I think I could write better software than my pharmacy has in a matter of months, but I would either have to sell it to risk-averse PHBs who don't understand technology or start my own mail-order pharmacy. Just writing some web app and putting it up has a far lower activation energy, even if there is more competition and the market is ultimately smaller. But if you know your market and are comfortable dealing with these businesses, you're in a great position. I can't imagine that any software would be boring if it's for your own startup.

edw519 19y ago

"More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags." Truer words were never posted on this site. Even though this is "hacker news", it really seems like a small subset of hackerdom. Seems like every other hacker wants to write the next paradigm changing Web 2.0 social networking new media mobile app looking for a market while 7 million small and medium sized business owners would rather chew razor blades than spend one more day with their current software. People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?

rsheridan6 19y ago
>People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open? I think there are two reasons: Hackers tend to be male computer geeks who majored in CS or something like that, and they write for markets that they understand, so they're mostly concentrated in the same markets because they understand the same things. Even within the Web 2.0 sphere lots of markets are ignored. Here's an example of a site that serves knitters: https://www.ravelry.com/account/login https://www.ravelry.com/account/login They've been around for less than a year and they have over 100K users. I only know about them because my wife knits. They have (or had when I checked it out several months ago) essentially no competition, because the intersection of people who are interested in hacking and knitting consists of very few people. IIRC it was written by the husband of a knitter. Second, dealing with businesses is kind of daunting. I think I could write better software than my pharmacy has in a matter of months, but I would either have to sell it to risk-averse PHBs who don't understand technology or start my own mail-order pharmacy. Just writing some web app and putting it up has a far lower activation energy, even if there is more competition and the market is ultimately smaller. But if you know your market and are comfortable dealing with these businesses, you're in a great position. I can't imagine that any software would be boring if it's for your own startup.