6 ms·

This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. Others that come to mind are MicroC

This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. Others that come to mind are MicroCAP for SPICE simulation, WRCAD for IC layout.

airbreather 5y ago
Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?
- scrdhrt 5y ago
  My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy retired life instead. I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    > I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'. Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by larger companies that will replace the niche software and process with something else. The current customers may not actually want anything other than regular updates while paying minimal support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify all the learning. I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small) company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2, with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was translated to me from various parties).
    - jaclaz 5y ago
      Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lost forever). But if the one man company is going to shut down because the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost for a young, willing programmer is 0. This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. What I have seen often is that the new program, for no real reason, has been written by someone that most probably is much more brilliant at programming but that knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that already surely happened in the tens of years of life of the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost and the new program repeats the same (or worse) mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were already solved). Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a programmer on Upwork.
        lowercased 5y ago
        Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie niche packages are built on the relationships, and replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard. A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom dancing software - it kept track of competitions, standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money, looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players, and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player. If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people will find another way to manage their stuff, but before then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would switch? How do you convince people to switch to something unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe? I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market for competition, because the barriers to entry are too high relative to the return.
- madengr 5y ago
  The latter. Profitable enough to make a living from, but not profitable enough (in these days) to be purchased and sustained.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Especially in an era of very high programmer salaries.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  First we need to understand if there is a trend and if it is accelerating. If so, it feels like “retirement” is a good first guess at why.
  - asah 5y ago
    why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...
    - tibbetts 5y ago
      One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and document how it works.
      - catmanjan 5y ago
        Pretty sure restaurants and car mechanics aren't unique skills and when they retire in my area someone usually buys them out and continues operating under the same name...
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        From what I recall from reading one of the "E-myth" books a while ago, whether the newly-owned shop will operate similarly to the old one, and also how difficult was it for the original owners to sell it, will depend on the documentation GP mentioned. Going from my memory, "E-myth" book(s) insist on thoroughly documenting operating procedures and turning them into playbook. Rigid in terms of personnel training, but open to change if someone figures out an improvement. The goal is to be able to scale up operations into multiple venues (franchise models) while maintaining highly consistent appearance and level of quality. As much as having such documentation will make it easier for a franchisee to get the business running (the books call it "turn-key business", IIRC), it will also make it easier for a potential buyer to take over and immediately hit the ground running.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  > small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. It could also be that they didn't appropriately expand, or expanded too much.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem. Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a professional license (very reasonable in the industry compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or near free for most students. Also, there is open source software as well that could eat into their niche.
  - padthai 5y ago
    Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions. They have an excellent and unique product and I would love to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider). But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem. I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the academic world.
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product. I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations. They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.
- bsder 5y ago
  > Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up? Bit of both. Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old. However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.
simonh 5y ago
MacKichan Software was founded in 1981. MicroCAP was launched in 1982. Stephen R. Whiteley who wrote WRCAD is 66. I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for. These were my thoughts exactly. These people got a an entire career out of independently working on software they (presumably) enjoyed developing. And if they open source it, the product lives on. It's not sad, it's great! Some of us should be so lucky.

airbreather 5y ago

Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?

scrdhrt 5y ago
My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been making some sort of map software for a very small niche in the marine industry, another has been making software for bee keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy retired life instead. I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.
- lowercased 5y ago
  > I suspect that, although there is a market for the products, noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on. It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a few reasons. In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it. The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts, and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'. Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by larger companies that will replace the niche software and process with something else. The current customers may not actually want anything other than regular updates while paying minimal support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify all the learning. I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small) company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2, with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was translated to me from various parties).
  - jaclaz 5y ago
    Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lost forever). But if the one man company is going to shut down because the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost for a young, willing programmer is 0. This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. What I have seen often is that the new program, for no real reason, has been written by someone that most probably is much more brilliant at programming but that knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that already surely happened in the tens of years of life of the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost and the new program repeats the same (or worse) mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were already solved). Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found, but won’t have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples above. You can’t sell Marine mapping software without knowing something about marine navigation. You can’t sell beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping. Plus you need the general business operation skills. Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a programmer on Upwork.
      - lowercased 5y ago
        Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie niche packages are built on the relationships, and replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard. A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom dancing software - it kept track of competitions, standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money, looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players, and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player. If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people will find another way to manage their stuff, but before then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would switch? How do you convince people to switch to something unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe? I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market for competition, because the barriers to entry are too high relative to the return.
madengr 5y ago
The latter. Profitable enough to make a living from, but not profitable enough (in these days) to be purchased and sustained.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Especially in an era of very high programmer salaries.
Waterluvian 5y ago
First we need to understand if there is a trend and if it is accelerating. If so, it feels like “retirement” is a good first guess at why.
- asah 5y ago
  why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate? someone surely would want it...
  - tibbetts 5y ago
    One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and document how it works.
    - catmanjan 5y ago
      Pretty sure restaurants and car mechanics aren't unique skills and when they retire in my area someone usually buys them out and continues operating under the same name...
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        From what I recall from reading one of the "E-myth" books a while ago, whether the newly-owned shop will operate similarly to the old one, and also how difficult was it for the original owners to sell it, will depend on the documentation GP mentioned. Going from my memory, "E-myth" book(s) insist on thoroughly documenting operating procedures and turning them into playbook. Rigid in terms of personnel training, but open to change if someone figures out an improvement. The goal is to be able to scale up operations into multiple venues (franchise models) while maintaining highly consistent appearance and level of quality. As much as having such documentation will make it easier for a franchisee to get the business running (the books call it "turn-key business", IIRC), it will also make it easier for a potential buyer to take over and immediately hit the ground running.
TheFreim 5y ago
> small, one person companies founded near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down. It could also be that they didn't appropriately expand, or expanded too much.
7thaccount 5y ago
If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem. Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a professional license (very reasonable in the industry compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or near free for most students. Also, there is open source software as well that could eat into their niche.
- padthai 5y ago
  Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions. They have an excellent and unique product and I would love to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider). But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem. I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the academic world.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product. I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations. They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.
bsder 5y ago
> Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up? Bit of both. Certainly people who tripped into a niche back in the 1980s/1990s are getting old. However, modern customer support has gotten stupidly expensive and annoying as hell. I blame the fact that modern users are significantly less sophisticated and significantly more demanding.

simonh 5y ago

MacKichan Software was founded in 1981. MicroCAP was launched in 1982. Stephen R. Whiteley who wrote WRCAD is 66. I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for.

itsoktocry 5y ago
>I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on for. These were my thoughts exactly. These people got a an entire career out of independently working on software they (presumably) enjoyed developing. And if they open source it, the product lives on. It's not sad, it's great! Some of us should be so lucky.