10 ms·

Every Company Is Becoming Software

65 points by vsyu 7y ago

proc0 7y ago
This will be useful for future AI "employees".
Mathnerd314 7y ago
They say software but then the article is about databases, event streams, and networked communication. But they leave out the other big part of running a company, which is getting the low-paid worker drones to show up on time and make the company money.
ken 7y ago
It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous article. Then by 1/3 of the way through, it's full on "Apache Kafka® and its uses". I feel cheated. I was ready to defend the non-software companies of the world, but the article has very little to do with the title. It seems like just an ad.
- flashgordon 7y ago
  Thank you thank you thank you. As soon as I saw your quote "Apache Kafka" the first thing that went through my mind was whether this was going to be a Confluent article and lo behold the title (and link) said it all, saving precious cycles!
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  Agreed. There should be law that forces all advertising to be within a dedicated HTML tag called <marketing> so that anyone can just opt in to a plugin that deletes all marketing tags. Would that clean up the Web or what!
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    But then ad companies wouldn't be software anymore!
    - arthurcolle 7y ago
      Win-win!
  - dominotw 7y ago
    HN is "marketing" for ycombinator.
    - arthurcolle 7y ago
      Well somehow it doesn't seem quite as toxic as newsvertisements similar to original post in question, and despite my original statement, I still enjoy posting here, so clearly this is a spectrum and what you are describing and what I am talking about are not quite identical. There's a difference between offering up a startup-oriented forum that still encourages people to post anything that is intellectually stimulating and interesting, while still allowing it to be an outlet for YC-backed startups to post and share things for discussion vs. posting a news article that piggybacks on Andreessen's well-publicized and becomes marketing spin about a specific product after a few introductory paragraphs. Just like how there's a difference between allowing a few "sponsored posts" on a search page, and having all of the front page be sponsored posts. Does that make more sense? Do you disagree that there's a difference between those two things?
      - dominotw 7y ago
        > Do you disagree that there's a difference between those two things? Yes. Although, I didn't make the assertion that they are the same.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    <marketing>They will just wrap everything in said tag.</marketing>
- hobofan 7y ago
  Sadly these days (probably has been true for a long time) the first thing to do when reading an article is checking the authors ties to a topic, and what agenda they might be trying to push. Since I already knew the company, when I saw the headline and their domain, my immediate reaction was: "Of course they would say that. They are a software vendor!"
  - rstuart4133 7y ago
    My technique is to read the comments on HN first. Only this time it almost failed me. The top comments were lamenting on how misleading the headline is. They were correct of course - but nonetheless it is in in-depth article on Apache Kafa discussing it's origin story, use cases, how it was used at Linkedin, and most interesting how it used to replace ACID applications with eventual consistency. All in all, a very good article, despite the lead in waffle at the start.
- behnamoh 7y ago
  >> It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous article. Do you mean this? https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world...
  - sixstringtheory 7y ago
    The first sentence of the article refers and links to that article, so yes.
mfer 7y ago
> That is, the core processes a business executes—from how it produces a product, to how it interacts with customers, to how it delivers services—are increasingly specified, monitored, and executed in software. When I think of businesses I think of the local auto repair shop, the restaurant around the corner, the paving company working on the roads, the local HVAC company around the corner from me, and the local gyms. The core products at the boot camp workout place across the street from me don't need to be specified, monitored, or executed in software. Somehow this reminded me that empathy is decreasing in society (you can search on it). Putting more computers between businesses and people isn't necessarily going to be better for people or the way we interact with each other.
- libertine 7y ago
  The sad thing, or at minimum odd thing, is that we're few years away from the positive differentiation factor being "you'll be talking to a human". In fact it should be made illegal to have people who's livelihood depend on a platform to be left at the hands of shit auto replies. If large scale comes at the cost of injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing. Youtube, Amazon Seller Central, and many others are terrible examples of what future holds for a lot of people.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    That's already the case in many industries - for many SaaS and telecom businesses the differentiator for expensive B2B plans is "24/7 support with a real human being", big IT companies like IBM and Oracle rely on "There's a human to blame when things go wrong" as their sole value prop, high-end retail like Nordstroms differentiates themselves from low-end retail like Walmart by the availability of personal sales assistants, and waiter-service restaurants differentiate themselves from McDonald's by the existence of a human who takes your order. The difference between Uber and a car service is whether the driver's waiting for you at baggage claim, greets you politely, and makes small talk on your way home. Personally I like it - I usually pick the self-checkouts, kiosks, and apps over talking with a real human being, who frequently acts like a robot anyway and tends to be slower and make mistakes more often. Also, I wonder if folks who say "if large scale comes at the cost of injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing" have really thought through the implications of this. I remember talking to a classmate in high school about Native American tribes, industrialization, American history, and how we really fucked over this idea of a tribe or village or community and the world was a lot less richer because of it. (This was pre-Internet - if only we could've guessed what the next 25 years would bring.) I agreed with all of his points, but then pointed out that the carrying capacity of the earth before modern agriculture, modern medicine, fossil fuels, etc. was roughly 1/20th what it is today, and did he really want to kill 95% of the people alive today? He responded, "Man, I feel shitty now." That's the nature of the scale vs. justice dilemma: you can't critically analyze scale & progress without also acknowledging the huge injustices it's created, but at the same time, reversing scale literally means death & suffering.
sergiotapia 7y ago
I'm two paragraphs in, it feel like this dude wants to sell me something. Edit: Yeah it was a pitch, sneaky sneaky ;)
- ttul 7y ago
  The HackerNews crowd will not be taken in by this copy; however, it will doubtless work on enterprise folks.
mavdi 7y ago
Cringy mental gymnastics of turning "Why Software is Eating the World" into "pay Confluent for something you get for free".
- opportune 7y ago
  Yeah, I actually flagged the post originally because it is so spammy and a dumb ad.
sov 7y ago
Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  Content Manager at Confluent: https://github.com/vsyu https://github.com/vsyu, https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/
haolez 7y ago
While I mostly agree with Jay Kreps, I believe that the upfront costs of event sourcing systems are way higher than traditional ones. Kafka itself seems to have minimum hardware requirements way above something like a single-node Mongo or Postgres installation, let alone the infrastructure to create projections.
nighthawk24 7y ago
2020 Every Company Is Becoming Software 2030 Every Company Is Becoming Smart Contract
geodel 7y ago
I am tempted to add "Every Software is becoming crappy". There will of course be exceptions but I feel general trend seems true.
jones1618 7y ago
True for a lot of industries. Unfortunately, there are two corporate responses to this: 1) Software is a strategic competitive advantage and market differentiator and 2) Software is a cheap commodity that can be outsourced and cobbled together from lowest-bidder parts. Not only do both attitudes exist at different companies but, in my experience, a single company can flip between "software is our secret sauce!" to "let's focus on our core strengths and outsource the rest!" in a heartbeat depending on what the venture capitalists say that week. Using some SAAS is often smart and useful but if you're outsourcing your core business processes and new development for the sake of short-term efficiency, you're handing the keys of innovation for your company over to somebody else.

65 points by vsyu 7y ago

This will be useful for future AI "employees".

They say software but then the article is about databases, event streams, and networked communication. But they leave out the other big part of running a company, which is getting the low-paid worker drones to show up on time and make the company money.

ken 7y ago

It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous article. Then by 1/3 of the way through, it's full on "Apache Kafka® and its uses". I feel cheated. I was ready to defend the non-software companies of the world, but the article has very little to do with the title. It seems like just an ad.

flashgordon 7y ago
Thank you thank you thank you. As soon as I saw your quote "Apache Kafka" the first thing that went through my mind was whether this was going to be a Confluent article and lo behold the title (and link) said it all, saving precious cycles!
arthurcolle 7y ago
Agreed. There should be law that forces all advertising to be within a dedicated HTML tag called <marketing> so that anyone can just opt in to a plugin that deletes all marketing tags. Would that clean up the Web or what!
- rolltiide 7y ago
  But then ad companies wouldn't be software anymore!
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    Win-win!
- dominotw 7y ago
  HN is "marketing" for ycombinator.
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    Well somehow it doesn't seem quite as toxic as newsvertisements similar to original post in question, and despite my original statement, I still enjoy posting here, so clearly this is a spectrum and what you are describing and what I am talking about are not quite identical. There's a difference between offering up a startup-oriented forum that still encourages people to post anything that is intellectually stimulating and interesting, while still allowing it to be an outlet for YC-backed startups to post and share things for discussion vs. posting a news article that piggybacks on Andreessen's well-publicized and becomes marketing spin about a specific product after a few introductory paragraphs. Just like how there's a difference between allowing a few "sponsored posts" on a search page, and having all of the front page be sponsored posts. Does that make more sense? Do you disagree that there's a difference between those two things?
    - dominotw 7y ago
      > Do you disagree that there's a difference between those two things? Yes. Although, I didn't make the assertion that they are the same.
- anticensor 7y ago
  <marketing>They will just wrap everything in said tag.</marketing>
hobofan 7y ago
Sadly these days (probably has been true for a long time) the first thing to do when reading an article is checking the authors ties to a topic, and what agenda they might be trying to push. Since I already knew the company, when I saw the headline and their domain, my immediate reaction was: "Of course they would say that. They are a software vendor!"
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  My technique is to read the comments on HN first. Only this time it almost failed me. The top comments were lamenting on how misleading the headline is. They were correct of course - but nonetheless it is in in-depth article on Apache Kafa discussing it's origin story, use cases, how it was used at Linkedin, and most interesting how it used to replace ACID applications with eventual consistency. All in all, a very good article, despite the lead in waffle at the start.
behnamoh 7y ago
>> It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous article. Do you mean this? https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world...
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  The first sentence of the article refers and links to that article, so yes.

mfer 7y ago

> That is, the core processes a business executes—from how it produces a product, to how it interacts with customers, to how it delivers services—are increasingly specified, monitored, and executed in software. When I think of businesses I think of the local auto repair shop, the restaurant around the corner, the paving company working on the roads, the local HVAC company around the corner from me, and the local gyms. The core products at the boot camp workout place across the street from me don't need to be specified, monitored, or executed in software. Somehow this reminded me that empathy is decreasing in society (you can search on it). Putting more computers between businesses and people isn't necessarily going to be better for people or the way we interact with each other.

libertine 7y ago
The sad thing, or at minimum odd thing, is that we're few years away from the positive differentiation factor being "you'll be talking to a human". In fact it should be made illegal to have people who's livelihood depend on a platform to be left at the hands of shit auto replies. If large scale comes at the cost of injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing. Youtube, Amazon Seller Central, and many others are terrible examples of what future holds for a lot of people.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  That's already the case in many industries - for many SaaS and telecom businesses the differentiator for expensive B2B plans is "24/7 support with a real human being", big IT companies like IBM and Oracle rely on "There's a human to blame when things go wrong" as their sole value prop, high-end retail like Nordstroms differentiates themselves from low-end retail like Walmart by the availability of personal sales assistants, and waiter-service restaurants differentiate themselves from McDonald's by the existence of a human who takes your order. The difference between Uber and a car service is whether the driver's waiting for you at baggage claim, greets you politely, and makes small talk on your way home. Personally I like it - I usually pick the self-checkouts, kiosks, and apps over talking with a real human being, who frequently acts like a robot anyway and tends to be slower and make mistakes more often. Also, I wonder if folks who say "if large scale comes at the cost of injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing" have really thought through the implications of this. I remember talking to a classmate in high school about Native American tribes, industrialization, American history, and how we really fucked over this idea of a tribe or village or community and the world was a lot less richer because of it. (This was pre-Internet - if only we could've guessed what the next 25 years would bring.) I agreed with all of his points, but then pointed out that the carrying capacity of the earth before modern agriculture, modern medicine, fossil fuels, etc. was roughly 1/20th what it is today, and did he really want to kill 95% of the people alive today? He responded, "Man, I feel shitty now." That's the nature of the scale vs. justice dilemma: you can't critically analyze scale & progress without also acknowledging the huge injustices it's created, but at the same time, reversing scale literally means death & suffering.

sergiotapia 7y ago

I'm two paragraphs in, it feel like this dude wants to sell me something. Edit: Yeah it was a pitch, sneaky sneaky ;)

ttul 7y ago
The HackerNews crowd will not be taken in by this copy; however, it will doubtless work on enterprise folks.

mavdi 7y ago

Cringy mental gymnastics of turning "Why Software is Eating the World" into "pay Confluent for something you get for free".

opportune 7y ago
Yeah, I actually flagged the post originally because it is so spammy and a dumb ad.

sov 7y ago

Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.

rad_gruchalski 7y ago
Content Manager at Confluent: https://github.com/vsyu https://github.com/vsyu, https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/

haolez 7y ago

While I mostly agree with Jay Kreps, I believe that the upfront costs of event sourcing systems are way higher than traditional ones. Kafka itself seems to have minimum hardware requirements way above something like a single-node Mongo or Postgres installation, let alone the infrastructure to create projections.

nighthawk24 7y ago

2020 Every Company Is Becoming Software 2030 Every Company Is Becoming Smart Contract

geodel 7y ago

I am tempted to add "Every Software is becoming crappy". There will of course be exceptions but I feel general trend seems true.

jones1618 7y ago

True for a lot of industries. Unfortunately, there are two corporate responses to this: 1) Software is a strategic competitive advantage and market differentiator and 2) Software is a cheap commodity that can be outsourced and cobbled together from lowest-bidder parts. Not only do both attitudes exist at different companies but, in my experience, a single company can flip between "software is our secret sauce!" to "let's focus on our core strengths and outsource the rest!" in a heartbeat depending on what the venture capitalists say that week. Using some SAAS is often smart and useful but if you're outsourcing your core business processes and new development for the sake of short-term efficiency, you're handing the keys of innovation for your company over to somebody else.