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Can you talk more about the opportunities and how dev process is related to product and where the opportunity lies? Sound like a provacative yet vacuous stateme

Can you talk more about the opportunities and how dev process is related to product and where the opportunity lies? Sound like a provacative yet vacuous statement to me?

solatic 8y ago
Basic formula: 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... etc. 1) Pick a well-established, non-high-tech industry, with poor technological adoption, which is not being dominated by a FAANG. Many options exist: banking, industry, food service, construction, transport, hotels, etc. 2) Start a small, local competitor. Differentiate through better technical service, using better dev process to respond quicker to market conditions. 3) Use that technical differentiation to ease scaling and enable growth. Ad infinitum. Many enterprises are still stuck in effectively yearly release cycles, not to mention the number of enterprises still encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes etc. Pick a "target" by making some phone calls, doing some networking, find a business which is encumbered this way, and start a competitor. It should not be difficult to steal business from a competitor which a) will take a year to release a response b) whose response will be handicapped by needing to support internal legacy systems with its response. If you think easy targets like that don't exist, you need to get out of SV and spend some time with the rest of the world.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Sometimes there's side considerations which are technically simple but logistically hard to work around. Technical differentiation is only one way to gain a competitive advantage, but it's also not necessarily the most important advantage. For example, it would be incredibly difficult to compete with Walmart unless you had a network large enough to compete with its effects on the entire production chain. Only someone else like Amazon can compete in that space, and it's not because they're technically superior, it's because they're friggin' huge.
- mmt 8y ago
  > 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... Technology != software. This is a distinction that I've found the vast majority of software people implicitly assume doesn't exist. A sibling comment points out that physical logistics sometimes can't be solved (competitively) by technology alone, but I posit that this is true even within technology. That is, not all technology problems can be (best/competitively) solved by software alone. None of FAANMG depends exclusively on software, running on someone else's hardware and network. G famously customizes their servers, and they had hardware frugality as part of their core strategy from the very start. > encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes That may not be as great an encumbrance as you imagine, considering the kind of performance modern mainframes can deliver. Are they over-paying for that performance, compared to best-case commodity hardware? Of course, since mainframes (for the latest models) are a monopoly. They may also be over-paying for the software and/or developers. A startup with AWS-based infrastructure will be over-paying, too. Cloud may not be a monopoly, but it's at least arguable if the competition is robust. That distributed computing system, with all the inefficiency added by the distribution, may be remarkably copetitive for someone that's paying below commodity prices for infrastructure. For someone paying 10x commodity to a cloud provider, not so much.

Can you talk more about the opportunities and how dev process is related to product and where the opportunity lies? Sound like a provacative yet vacuous statement to me?

solatic 8y ago

Basic formula: 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... etc. 1) Pick a well-established, non-high-tech industry, with poor technological adoption, which is not being dominated by a FAANG. Many options exist: banking, industry, food service, construction, transport, hotels, etc. 2) Start a small, local competitor. Differentiate through better technical service, using better dev process to respond quicker to market conditions. 3) Use that technical differentiation to ease scaling and enable growth. Ad infinitum. Many enterprises are still stuck in effectively yearly release cycles, not to mention the number of enterprises still encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes etc. Pick a "target" by making some phone calls, doing some networking, find a business which is encumbered this way, and start a competitor. It should not be difficult to steal business from a competitor which a) will take a year to release a response b) whose response will be handicapped by needing to support internal legacy systems with its response. If you think easy targets like that don't exist, you need to get out of SV and spend some time with the rest of the world.

peterwwillis 8y ago
Sometimes there's side considerations which are technically simple but logistically hard to work around. Technical differentiation is only one way to gain a competitive advantage, but it's also not necessarily the most important advantage. For example, it would be incredibly difficult to compete with Walmart unless you had a network large enough to compete with its effects on the entire production chain. Only someone else like Amazon can compete in that space, and it's not because they're technically superior, it's because they're friggin' huge.
mmt 8y ago
> 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... Technology != software. This is a distinction that I've found the vast majority of software people implicitly assume doesn't exist. A sibling comment points out that physical logistics sometimes can't be solved (competitively) by technology alone, but I posit that this is true even within technology. That is, not all technology problems can be (best/competitively) solved by software alone. None of FAANMG depends exclusively on software, running on someone else's hardware and network. G famously customizes their servers, and they had hardware frugality as part of their core strategy from the very start. > encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes That may not be as great an encumbrance as you imagine, considering the kind of performance modern mainframes can deliver. Are they over-paying for that performance, compared to best-case commodity hardware? Of course, since mainframes (for the latest models) are a monopoly. They may also be over-paying for the software and/or developers. A startup with AWS-based infrastructure will be over-paying, too. Cloud may not be a monopoly, but it's at least arguable if the competition is robust. That distributed computing system, with all the inefficiency added by the distribution, may be remarkably copetitive for someone that's paying below commodity prices for infrastructure. For someone paying 10x commodity to a cloud provider, not so much.