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Ask HN: What's the greatest piece of non-dogfooded software?
It seems like every "great" piece of software, e.g. the operating systems of Apple and Microsoft, the search engine of Google, AWS inside Amazon, Facebook etc was dogfooded.
What's the biggest exception to this rule?
- abc000 1y agoNone.
- _pdcz 1y ago[dead]
- defrost 1y agoThe US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (DDSACCS), which sends emergency action messages to nuclear forces. Not entirely software .. but an example of a system not used in house .. or at all ... yet. Greatest? Hmm. Hard to say.
- muzani 1y agoNuclear deterrence means that a nation can counter while/after being nuked, and it has to demonstrate this capacity confidently enough to deter any country that would nuke them. It would be an amazing system. Cut the head off and up to 20% of the world is dead or injured, followed by the socioeconomic collapse due to destruction at this scale.
- d--b 1y agoWell software for non-software people... Like I doubt that people writing autoCAD are ones who needed it in the first place. Maybe I am wrong.
- JohnFen 1y agoI don't think you're wrong. Most of my career has been working on specialty software that no individual (including myself) could use, and therefore can't be dogfooded.
- mattbrewsbytes 1y agoDo companies like Oracle and SAP run their own business on their ERP platforms? That might be the biggest one.
- thorin 1y agoI'm pretty sure they do, but quite a few parts of the Oracle applications suite are acquired so probably not those. I'm sure sap would use sap erp, from what I've seen almost all big European companies use sap for payroll.
- aristofun 1y agoHow is facebook dogfooded? Do they buy facebook ads? And wasn’t windows originally created as a product for sale? I don’t remember microsoft starting as hardware company. Maybe that is why windows sucks :)
- LarryMade2 1y agoI think there are probably some out there, likely would have started out as a niche contract job (like say fast food POS systems) and have built up from there. Though its really hard to make something like that "great" unless you hire experts from that field to help develop them.
- yamatokaneko 1y agoThe first company that came to mind is Unity. Epic has Unreal and actively dogfoods it by developing Fortnite. But Unity doesn’t really have a flagship product like that, right? I'm sure they use it internally to build sample games, but nothing at AAA scale?