7 ms·

I've transcended the vanilla/framework arguments in favor of "do we even need a website for this?". I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical

• getnormality 1y ago
  This is how 100% B2B worked before there was B2B SaaS, and it's still how 99% of B2B works today.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Yep. EDI and FTP.
    • accrual 1y ago
      Still is that way in many places. Some smaller clients I've worked with prefer the flat-file + FTP over a more integrated solution (TCP/IP, etc.).
• _heimdall 1y ago
  Especially for internal tooling that is little more than CRUD, I find the web to be most useful when a consultant is brought in to build it once or when an internal team can't be allocated to help maintain it. If you have even a small bandwidth to maintain it over time, quick and simple solutions like an Excel template and a few custom scripts work great and often end up being more flexible as your end user is mostly working with raw data.
• ern 1y ago
  I agree. Having seem enormous amounts of effort wasted on implementing fancy web apps by Digital-first consultancies (they reject BAs, but substitute designers) in the B2B space, I think there does need to be more education for the people who procure this stuff (especially in government) who get ripped off routinely.
• bradly 1y ago
  I sell urns online and my website just has an email link. No shopping cart. A brick-and-mortor urn shop would never have a shopping cart, so why would a virtual one? I've purchased specialized woodworking tools online that simply involved filling out a form. I later received the parts with an invoice to send payment. You can simply not pay if you choose not to. There are so many way to do commerce both on and offline and if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you.
  • numbsafari 1y ago
    As in urns for ashes, not Universal Resource Names.
    • jagged-chisel 1y ago
      urns, not URNs
  • 90s_dev 1y ago
    > if you squint and look closely you'll find interesting people doing interesting things all around you Yep :)
  • gotaqmyfriends 1y ago
    How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Is there a trusted relationship? A threat of legal action? I know the other way around is basically the norm: how does one know the company, the seller, will actually provide the product after paying. But the prevailing culture, currently, is that companies in this regard are trustworthy and customers are not. It's a bit debatable but it makes sense.
    • bradly 1y ago
      > How does the woodworking company ensure payment? Does the specialized nature ensure only "real" customers buy? Yes, I believe it does. These are highly specific brass tacks for making oval shaker boxes. There are very few manufactures of a proper #2 brass tack these days, so I would very much want to stay on the good side and any suppliers. I think they said in their faq that twice they haven't been paid in 20 years or something like that. Their online "store" appears to be down right now–hopefully they are still in business. edit: It appears John passed in 2023 :( https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-2023-the-shaker-box-king/ https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/02/07/john-wilson-1939-20...
• landgenoot 1y ago
  I moved to south east Asia and the phenomenon of a "hotline" openend my eyes. Every business is basically a phone number that you can message. It does not matter if you buy a pizza or furniture, book a hotel or need someone to clean your sofa. No website. No need to fill in forms. No platform fee.
  • KPGv2 1y ago
    Can it work that way? Of course. But just because it works that way there, doesn't mean it's right. There's nothing about SEA that implies to me the pinnacle of operational efficiency.
  • chenster 1y ago
    In south east asia, people dont' have very good phone or even smart phone in that matter, txt msg makes sense. The same to many african countries where dumb phones are still dominant.
    • paulmooreparks 1y ago
      I live in Singapore and travel to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand quite a bit. What you say is certainly not what I observe.
    • shark_laser 1y ago
      I cannot speak for Africa, but this is not true of South East Asia. Whilst cheap 'dumb' phones do still exist and are used, even low income earners in South East Asia tend to have a smart phone, and most of the business done as landgenoot says is conducted via Telegram, Facebook, or occasionally WhatsApp or Line. There are also ways of paying using nothing but a phone number, but usually business is done on a smart phone where photos of products are are shared, delivery is arranged, and since COVID, most payments are done via QR codes that require a smart phone. In my experience this is not only true of the cities, but also even out in the provinces.
    • mrheosuper 1y ago
      Do you really think that SEA is still stuck in such economy ? Man you need to explore the world more
• AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  > I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser. Enabling customer self administration/configuration of a "B2B SaaS" system mandates some form of interaction. I would be surprised at how many would not expect "touching a browser" to do so. > A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to administrative-style UI/UX wherein we are ultimately giving the admin a way to mutate fields in a database somewhere such that the application behaves to the customer's expectations. If there is no validation of information given nor system rules enforcement, then I would question the correctness of said sites/applications. > In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables. This approach obviates the value added by a system enforcing core software engineering concepts such as fitness of purpose, error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control. In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point.
  • bob1029 1y ago
    > In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point. Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever. > error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control. I'd take a look at the Nacha (ACH) operating rules if you have any doubt that sophisticated business workflows can be built on top of flat files and asynchronous transmission. https://www.nacha.org/newrules https://www.nacha.org/newrules
    • KPGv2 1y ago
      > Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever. I might be mistaken, but isn't banking famous for (1) the long hours (i.e., processes suck), (2) the drudgery of updating said Excel files (i.e., processes suck) (3) horribly expensive to access (i.e., processes suck) I have never once in my life as a corporate lawyer thought of banking as a model of operational efficiency.
• al_borland 1y ago
  I’ve never felt more useless at work than when I was told to integrated with a new React self-service portal. No one actually wanted to build things for it or use it. It was the pet project of a new CIO. I think it fell over under its own weight in under 2 years.
  • brodo 1y ago
    If that's the most useless thing you ever did at work, count youself lucky.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables. > Email and flat files are far more flexible than any web solution. Some times I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read HN lately. Suggesting that we e-mail requests around and have a person on the other end manually do things including merge data into SQL tables is such a bizarre claim to see. Every once in a while I encounter some business that operates like this and it’s inevitably a nightmare, either as a customer or a partner. Not to mention it’s ripe for everything from fraud to the company falling apart because the person who normally reads those e-mails and does the things for 20 years suddenly leaves one day. This feels like a mix of rose-tinted glasses reminiscing about the old-timey way of doing things combined with a layer of career burnout that makes everything modern feel bad. Dealing with a business that operates this way is not good.
  • motogpjimbo 1y ago
    Excel files can work surprisingly well in B2B scenarios where there's a high degree of trust. At a retailer I used to work at, we ran an impromptu Christmas gifts team in December each year, where corporate clients could put in a large order of gifts to be sent to their employees. Rather than build a website for it, we just sent them over an Excel file they could fill in with the name and address of each employee, the gift they wanted to receive and a message for the label. They'd send the file back to us and we had a process to validate the data and load it into our system. It sounds primitive, but it was much more time- and cost-efficient than faffing around with a custom application that we would only use for one month per year and which the clients probably wouldn't enjoy using anyway.
  • briandear 1y ago
    For real. The UX matters. Reducing the surface area for errors is also valuable. If “overbuilt” means “putting a clear UX around an important business process” then I love overbuilt. It was like that one dude on HN that criticized Dropbox back in day saying he could have built it in a weekend using rsync and a bunch other nerd nonsense that the average person doesn’t have the time or the expertise to mess with.
  • 1y ago
• lerp-io 1y ago
  no no no.....what you people really need is just an ai chatbot that simply generates your crud app/interface/store/whatever on the fly, so you don't even need excel or anything at all and the internet is just one big open vector database big brain. b2b, saas, excel, admin roles?? haha whats that?? and then we just relax outside in the grass hugging trees and smoking pot or whatever like in the 80s.
  • jonathanlb 1y ago
    Weirdly this is something similar to what Satya Nadella said. > Yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a very, very, very important question, the SaaS applications, or biz apps. So let me just speak of our own dynamics. The approach at least we’re taking is, I think, the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right in the agent era, because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi repo CRUD, right? So they’re not going to discriminate between what the back end is. They’re going to update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak. And once the AI tier becomes the place where all the logic is, then people will start replacing the back ends, right? https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/hey-why-do-i-need-excel-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-foresees-a-disruptive-agentic-ai-era-that-could-aggressively-collapse-saas-apps https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/hey-why-do-i-need-e...
    • beezlewax 1y ago
      Except this is pure fantasy and AI is uniquely unreliable and error prone.
      • addaon 1y ago
        > Except this is pure fantasy and AI is uniquely unreliable and error prone. Is this perhaps why Microsoft is in a uniquely good spot to take advantage of AI for customer facing software? If customer expectation of your software is already that it's horribly unreliable and error prone, AI bringing more of the same may not really hurt...
• mannycalavera42 1y ago
  <<Wait, it's just a bunch of Excels?>> <<Always has been>>
  • int_19h 1y ago
    Well, sometimes it was DBF files (of dBase / FoxPro / Clipper fame). The first app I ever wrote for money was a thing that prompted you to insert a floppy with a .dbf consisting of a list of recalled products and append it into a local database (another .dbf!) that would let the user query the whole thing. The floppies were obtained by means of a person walking to the local office of the corresponding government entity where they would hand a blank floppy and receive it back with the copy of the most recent updates. That was late 90s. This evolved through multiple iterations as the government end of it did. At one point you no longer had to walk there physically; instead, there was a dial-up endpoint running UUCP that could be used to fetch the file. Then they found out about Internet, and it became a website with the file, now .mdb (MS Access) rather than .dbf. I rewrote the app in .NET/WinForms, since it was much easier to do all those things from it than to try bolting it onto an old TUI DOS app. But it was still basically the same table with the same schema by mid-10s, and my app was still chugging along. I wonder sometimes if some iteration of it is still in use today; wouldn't be surprised if it were.
• hliyan 1y ago
  I think of something similar every time I use the Uber Eats 'track order' screen. All I need is a simple textual history: 7:40 - Bob was delayed by 5 minutes. ETA 7.45 7:35 - Bob is heading your way. ETA 7:40 7:20 - Bob has picked up your order from Pizza place
  • patrickmcnamara 1y ago
    Having a live location of the delivery person makes total sense here though.
    • hliyan 1y ago
      Why? What I would prefer is a "Notify me when the rider is [X] minutes away. Use ringtone [R]" feature. X is the time I need to go downstairs and open the gate. The customer need not have their brains cluttered with logistics details.
      • Vinz_ 1y ago
        Because in a lot of cases, the driver isn’t in the correct place, and so if you have their location you can easily tell them how to get to you. I’ve had multiple deliveries where the Uber Eats app just could not tell the driver the correct location for my address, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the driver how to get there by just them telling me where they were.
        • hliyan 1y ago
          For that, I would propose a feature where I can mark the directions to my home from a well known checkpoint on a map, one time. If the rider deviates in the last mile, they get notification. If they continue to deviate, I get a notification. The solution is not for me not constantly monitor the rider's location.
          • monsieurbanana 1y ago
            As this thread is about over engineering solutions, I can't help but wonder if this is satire
• bbkane 1y ago
  In fact, I've gone the opposite way- my work has an internal cafe with a menu website that takes a lot of clicks to see everything. I originally planned to scrape the data and make my own website with better (imo) controls, but v0 turned into pumping the data into a Google sheet. I've never needed v1. The Google sheets "UI" solves filtering (i.e., breakfast vs lunch), access control, and basic analytics (~7 other colleagues also use this daily).
  • invaliduser 1y ago
    I have a similar experience with providing users with excel files, but would also like to add that in a lot of business, the number 1 competition for a web application is the good old excel file (or its modern cloud version), and it's sometimes a challenge to beat.
    • gampleman 1y ago
      Yeah, I've spent 2 years in a job trying to build a UI to beat an Excel file. Did not succeed.
    • thesuitonym 1y ago
      I really hate how much work happens out of Excel/Google Sheets, but there's no denying that spreadsheets do a lot of heavy lifting without having to fuss with putting a DB together. Especially nowadays when two people can simultaneously work in a spreadsheet.
• mvkel 1y ago
  This is some excellent first-principles thinking. Sort of like resisting the next team hire until it's unbearable, keeping the user out of the browser until it's unbearable
• Alex_001 1y ago
  [dead]
• raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Some even still use textfiles to exchange order information on a jointly used ftp server, where the most common error is that access happens simultaneously. That said, there are b2b exchanges where a simple website is perfect. Supplier quality cases where people need to exchange short texts or general supplier information exchange. Also b2b customers are far less concerned about UX style than the average retail customer. The former wants a system that just works efficiently and everything else is a waste of time. Sometimes productivity clashes with modern sensibilities and in the b2b case productivity still wins. I hate mail though for formal processes though. In that case a link to a simple website that orderly takes up information and it is the better solution. I also hate putting excel files into tables. There is always something going wrong, especially with files created in many different languages, and it is still work overhead. But there are already solutions for general information exchange that aren't necessarily parasitic SaaS services. Of course there are alternatives, but I wouldn't call the usual ERP/CRM software superior to web apps.
• larodi 1y ago
  Lets first not forget: 1) people been doing business with these "ugly" green textmode screens, long before web; 2) the web existed in a very reasonable form pre-www as FIDO, GOPHER, and of course IRC & EMAIL. The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-complex technologies we have today. Even vanilla web is quite complex if you take into consideration all the W3 standardization. Security or not, you can have an appliance run much simpler software given longer product lifetimes,... My only hope is now with llm-assisted coding this vanilla approach comes back, as the boilerplate pain becomes more bearable (how I really hated html at some point...). Besides, it is much more pleasant to prompt yourself a website, rather than try to position some image on stupid fb/insta pages/events, which is one major reason to step back and own your content again.
  • astrobe_ 1y ago
    > The fact that this all got hyperlinked is a superb. convenient, but also a challenge from tech perspective, and what FAANG did in the 30 years to come (after 1992) led to this horror of entangled and super-complex technologies we have today. Even vanilla web is quite complex if you take into consideration all the W3 standardization. With that title I didn't expect Javascript to be part of the equation. To me "vanilla" is CERN's HTTP+HTML. The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance. There are some secessionists - Gopher is still alive, Gemini - but alternatives have a hard time to compete with the content companies can provide apparently for free. Most of the content we want costs time and/or money. Content creators can be fine with contributing from their own pocket, but this is not really sustainable. User sponsorship (donations via Paypal, Patreon, Kofi, ...) don't work well either. Also, since the supporters of the alternatives are generally supporters of freedom (who isn't? Well, people don't reject freedom, they are "just" making compromises), they have to deal with illegal content and other forms of abuse. So there are 3 problems an alternative web must solve: protocols, moderation and repayment.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• jfengel 1y ago
  I've found that "send me a spreadsheet and I'll upload it" isn't a great user experience. It's just a big pile of cells, with no documentation (which they wouldn't read anyway).There are a billion things they can do wrong, and they get no feedback on it until I email it to them. They don't know what the options are for any field, and it's easy to enter a nonstandard value. A typo in a header row can lead to data loss with no errors. There are times when it's the easiest way to handle things, especially for experienced users. But I find it a massive hassle to maintain support for every possible mistake the user can make.
  • j45 1y ago
    Spreadsheets are often where so much software starts. I'm not an instant fan of it, but it is one way for someone to lay out their thinking about how to solve something that works.
  • dragontamer 1y ago
    Excel is more than cells? If you have certain options, use Excels forms to place buttons, menus and selections.
    • accrual 1y ago
      Fixed drop-down fields are very helpful for shared/inter-company spreadsheets too. Highlight them in red until they're changed, then enforce the value via dropdown.
    • tchalvakspamm 1y ago
      Oh god, a webpage built in excel
  • bandoti 1y ago
    It could work but there is still a bit of developer overhead: (1) Use iron-clad schema validation in the database; (2) Provide some forms over top the Excel data like old Access applications. The benefit would be that you have a fixed set of UI components available in Excel and don’t need to worry about styling and whatnot.
• nswest23 1y ago
  this is a troll, right?
• firemelt 1y ago
  >A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to administrative-style UI/UX wherein we are ultimately giving the admin a way to mutate fields in a database somewhere such that the application behaves to the customer's expectations. that is, letting your user to blindly and impulsively following what they want is a mistake.