6 ms·

>A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly. Why do you think t

by simias 8y ago

>A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to have an impact in than it used to be. That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. You can be the smartest coder on earth, if you want to write a complex application today (say, video editing software, smartphone interface, a kernel, a web browser etc...) you're looking at man-years of work if you want to start from scratch. And if you don't start from scratch it'll be harder to differentiate yourself from the competition and "disrupt" the status quo. I'm always amused when I read stories from the 70's and 80's about lone hackers writing a cool hack for a computer or application of the time and managing to sell it for a lot of money. Like this story I remember reading on HN of the hacker who managed to write a task switching application for some Apple computer of the time and managed to sell it to Steve Jobs (I don't remember all the details and I can't find the article at the moment). It was a clever and completely non-portable use of the hardware resources, in the end it was probably a few kilobytes of (very clever) code. It's hard to imagine something like that today.

somabc 8y ago
There are small startups born out of targeted smart application of code today that are similar to a lone hacker and sold to Google. eg Graphics Fuzz with it's intelligent code reducer which Google bought to use with Android. https://www.graphicsfuzz.com/howitworks.html https://www.graphicsfuzz.com/howitworks.html
pixl97 8y ago
>Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. Complexity. Consumers demand more complex applications. Platforms have more complex requirements.
- cs02rm0 8y ago
  I could well find out I'm wrong in retrospect, but I think part of that is that the low hanging fruit is just gone. It means once you've made it there's a barrier to entry that keeps you protected, so you may as well go big or go home. I pitched a startup idea today to an accelerator judging panel. There were three distinct software components to it, each quite complex in the detail and I had three minutes to cover the lot because they're flooded with candidates even after the first sift throwing 80% away. Yet, comparatively it feels quite simple - no AI or ML involved or highly regulated areas. I might go and find a pong clone to play to cheer myself up.
dri_ft 8y ago
> Like this story I remember reading on HN of the hacker who managed to write a task switching application for some Apple computer of the time and managed to sell it to Steve Jobs (I don't remember all the details and I can't find the article at the moment). https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- simias 8y ago
  That's it, thank you!
sandworm101 8y ago
Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. The gaming industry still has room for lone coders to make a difference. Many of the top indi games are/were written by individuals (KSP, Minecraft) or by very small groups (Factorio). Sometimes being able to do something leaner, with less code, means you can win ground against the biggest of big guys (City Skylines over SimCity).
- throwaway080383 8y ago
  Heck, both DotA and Counter-Strike began life as user-made mods on existing games, and their relevancy has far outlived those of the base games.
- simias 8y ago
  > Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. Sure but my point is more general: if I create a new lean web-like protocol and client and it can't display videos, feature interactive content, arbitrary styles etc... How do I drive adoption? I can convince the suckless folks that "less is more" and that it's "the unix way" but outside of that circle I'm not sure who's going to use my software. All software seems to be going in the opposite direction. For instance I'm a heavy user of IRC, these days the type of communities you could find on QuakeNet 15 years ago are on Discord, a super heavy webchat client that manages to slow down my beefy desktop computer when run on pre-quantom Firefox. The Discord client is probably several times heavier on resource usage than the Quake game itself!
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    I hate when my phone wastes my time loading junk. A browser that couldn't even try, that couldn't be tricked into doing so, would find a market imho.
CalChris 8y ago
A more concrete example is MS-DOS which wasn't written by Gates+Allen. It was purchased for $75,000 in 1981 ($207,925.74 in 2018) and a job.
- pofilat 8y ago
  And was allegedly plagiarized from QDOS. https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-o...
ryandrake 8y ago
> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and said, “you know, this software needs to be as complex as possible!” Yet we keep building complex software. Layer after layer of libraries and APIs. Frameworks and more frameworks. Containers. Multiple languages. Front end and back end. Machine learning. Problems that used to be solved on a PC now require a 150 node cluster. It’s fashionable to throw huge teams, hardware and middleware at problems these days. There is still opportunity for the lone coder and the lean startup. You need the competence to stop writing all these bullshit layers and code simply.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  A lot of these abstractions, for good or for ill, make it easier for "large" organizations (where "large" here means > 10 people) to iterate quickly. Users do not need the abstraction, but it makes the organization as a whole quicker and more agile. It is an interesting question whether startups can enter a market served by a larger organization and disrupt it by offering lean products built by lean teams.
- nicodjimenez 8y ago
  Programs are big because peoples needs are big.
  - pofilat 8y ago
    Parent is downvoted but I recall it as an epigram (and I agree) but can't find references discussing it. Users wouldn't tolerate WordStar and Pac-Man today.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Do Google Docs have more features than WordStar?
dansingerman 8y ago
> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. I disagree. If you want to make a competitive product to the products made by big shops, then that is true. However true innovation is often making something in a category that is new or not well served. When Jobs/Wozniak made the Apple 1, they weren't competing with big shops mass producing other desktops, they were competing with the likes of MITS producing build-your-own computer kits. Also the prevalence of on-demand services and APIs now mean you rarely have to make lots of complex software from the ground up. The secret is to find some value your software can deliver which competitors don't exist for, or don't do well. If you look at the boom in solopreneurship and side projects it's self-evident to me it's never been easier. Aside: the reason the 'cool hack' stories don't exist now is that they were often about using limited resources to do things that were seemingly difficult/impossible on the available platforms. So they were still examples of new software delivering value. But now as we are far less resource-constrained, and software as a whole is a lot more mature, these opportunities are a lot more scarce.
awvcs 8y ago
> Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. There are a lot of stories of people falling into technology entrepreneurship by showing up. I guess you could say that it was less competitive (which it was), but I also think that society was more lenient. We hadn't figured out yet how to charge a lot for everything. If some landlord was 'greedy' you could move to some adjacent area. Today with information spreading so fast everyone knows not only what something is worth but what it could potentially be worth and price accordingly. Like this story from Max Levchin starting with "I didn't really make any arrangements, so I just crashed on Scott's floor" [0]. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-paypal-affirm-success-2017-11?r=US&IR=T&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-paypal-affirm-su...
hinkley 8y ago
It never struck me that lean startups were supposed to be about disrupting anything. Disruption to me is a power grab and you have to do it with some exuberance or why bother?
tarsinge 8y ago
It depends of the space you're operating in. From what I've seen in line of business software, the quality is mediocre at best, and Excel is still everywhere. Here a Lean approach on targeted business processes is still viable and can make wonders. Also sometimes we self-impose complexity with our tools. For example I recently displaced a competitor with a full team having a hard time delivering because of the disproportionate complexity of their stack regarding the problem (full SPA for a simple CRUD app), where I could do it as a solo effort costing ten times less.

by simias 8y ago

somabc 8y ago

There are small startups born out of targeted smart application of code today that are similar to a lone hacker and sold to Google. eg Graphics Fuzz with it's intelligent code reducer which Google bought to use with Android. https://www.graphicsfuzz.com/howitworks.html https://www.graphicsfuzz.com/howitworks.html

pixl97 8y ago

>Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. Complexity. Consumers demand more complex applications. Platforms have more complex requirements.

cs02rm0 8y ago
I could well find out I'm wrong in retrospect, but I think part of that is that the low hanging fruit is just gone. It means once you've made it there's a barrier to entry that keeps you protected, so you may as well go big or go home. I pitched a startup idea today to an accelerator judging panel. There were three distinct software components to it, each quite complex in the detail and I had three minutes to cover the lot because they're flooded with candidates even after the first sift throwing 80% away. Yet, comparatively it feels quite simple - no AI or ML involved or highly regulated areas. I might go and find a pong clone to play to cheer myself up.

dri_ft 8y ago

> Like this story I remember reading on HN of the hacker who managed to write a task switching application for some Apple computer of the time and managed to sell it to Steve Jobs (I don't remember all the details and I can't find the article at the moment). https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

simias 8y ago
That's it, thank you!

sandworm101 8y ago

Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. The gaming industry still has room for lone coders to make a difference. Many of the top indi games are/were written by individuals (KSP, Minecraft) or by very small groups (Factorio). Sometimes being able to do something leaner, with less code, means you can win ground against the biggest of big guys (City Skylines over SimCity).

throwaway080383 8y ago
Heck, both DotA and Counter-Strike began life as user-made mods on existing games, and their relevancy has far outlived those of the base games.
simias 8y ago
> Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. Sure but my point is more general: if I create a new lean web-like protocol and client and it can't display videos, feature interactive content, arbitrary styles etc... How do I drive adoption? I can convince the suckless folks that "less is more" and that it's "the unix way" but outside of that circle I'm not sure who's going to use my software. All software seems to be going in the opposite direction. For instance I'm a heavy user of IRC, these days the type of communities you could find on QuakeNet 15 years ago are on Discord, a super heavy webchat client that manages to slow down my beefy desktop computer when run on pre-quantom Firefox. The Discord client is probably several times heavier on resource usage than the Quake game itself!
- sandworm101 8y ago
  I hate when my phone wastes my time loading junk. A browser that couldn't even try, that couldn't be tricked into doing so, would find a market imho.

CalChris 8y ago

A more concrete example is MS-DOS which wasn't written by Gates+Allen. It was purchased for $75,000 in 1981 ($207,925.74 in 2018) and a job.

pofilat 8y ago
And was allegedly plagiarized from QDOS. https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-o...

ryandrake 8y ago

> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and said, “you know, this software needs to be as complex as possible!” Yet we keep building complex software. Layer after layer of libraries and APIs. Frameworks and more frameworks. Containers. Multiple languages. Front end and back end. Machine learning. Problems that used to be solved on a PC now require a 150 node cluster. It’s fashionable to throw huge teams, hardware and middleware at problems these days. There is still opportunity for the lone coder and the lean startup. You need the competence to stop writing all these bullshit layers and code simply.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
A lot of these abstractions, for good or for ill, make it easier for "large" organizations (where "large" here means > 10 people) to iterate quickly. Users do not need the abstraction, but it makes the organization as a whole quicker and more agile. It is an interesting question whether startups can enter a market served by a larger organization and disrupt it by offering lean products built by lean teams.
nicodjimenez 8y ago
Programs are big because peoples needs are big.
- pofilat 8y ago
  Parent is downvoted but I recall it as an epigram (and I agree) but can't find references discussing it. Users wouldn't tolerate WordStar and Pac-Man today.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Do Google Docs have more features than WordStar?

dansingerman 8y ago

> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. I disagree. If you want to make a competitive product to the products made by big shops, then that is true. However true innovation is often making something in a category that is new or not well served. When Jobs/Wozniak made the Apple 1, they weren't competing with big shops mass producing other desktops, they were competing with the likes of MITS producing build-your-own computer kits. Also the prevalence of on-demand services and APIs now mean you rarely have to make lots of complex software from the ground up. The secret is to find some value your software can deliver which competitors don't exist for, or don't do well. If you look at the boom in solopreneurship and side projects it's self-evident to me it's never been easier. Aside: the reason the 'cool hack' stories don't exist now is that they were often about using limited resources to do things that were seemingly difficult/impossible on the available platforms. So they were still examples of new software delivering value. But now as we are far less resource-constrained, and software as a whole is a lot more mature, these opportunities are a lot more scarce.

awvcs 8y ago

> Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. There are a lot of stories of people falling into technology entrepreneurship by showing up. I guess you could say that it was less competitive (which it was), but I also think that society was more lenient. We hadn't figured out yet how to charge a lot for everything. If some landlord was 'greedy' you could move to some adjacent area. Today with information spreading so fast everyone knows not only what something is worth but what it could potentially be worth and price accordingly. Like this story from Max Levchin starting with "I didn't really make any arrangements, so I just crashed on Scott's floor" [0]. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-paypal-affirm-success-2017-11?r=US&IR=T&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/max-levchin-paypal-affirm-su...

hinkley 8y ago

It never struck me that lean startups were supposed to be about disrupting anything. Disruption to me is a power grab and you have to do it with some exuberance or why bother?

tarsinge 8y ago

It depends of the space you're operating in. From what I've seen in line of business software, the quality is mediocre at best, and Excel is still everywhere. Here a Lean approach on targeted business processes is still viable and can make wonders. Also sometimes we self-impose complexity with our tools. For example I recently displaced a competitor with a full team having a hard time delivering because of the disproportionate complexity of their stack regarding the problem (full SPA for a simple CRUD app), where I could do it as a solo effort costing ten times less.