Recent searches
Search options
I once worked at a company that sold industry-specific core-business software to deep-pocketed corps who couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t roll their own. I got into a discuss with my manager about whether our products were essentially — my words — a hoax.
Me: “Look, our products are riddled with bugs and holes. They’re nearly impossible to deploy, manage, and maintain. They frequently don’t even work •at all• on the putative release date, and we sell the mop-up as expensive ‘consulting.’”
1/
“How can it not be a hoax?!”
He said something that completely changed how I look at the workings of business:
“Paul, you are making the mistake of comparing our software to your ideal of what it •should• be. That’s not what these companies are doing. They’re comparing it to what they already have now. And what they have now is •terrible•.”
2/
He continued: “They’re doing business with Excel spreadsheets, or ancient mainframes, or in many cases still using pen and paper processes [this was the early 00s], and those processes are just wildly labor-intensive and error-ridden. They lose unimaginable amounts of money to this. For them to pay us a measly few million to get software that takes 18 months to get deployed and just barely working? That is a •huge• improvement for them.”
In short: our product sucked, but it wasn’t a hoax.
3/
@inthehands you'll have to forgive I've not read the full thread. But up to this point I'd like to share an alternative perspective. I work with businesses that still have those 'outdated' processes today and one of the reasons they haven't migrated to more sophisticated software yet is that it offers marginal benefits. When you dig into the cost of employing people to do general admin sometimes the cost-benefit of upgrading is very tight. Often the sales and marketing is the actual 'hoax'.
@stew_sims
Yeah. For example: some of those ancient mainframe systems are just rock solid: somebody built it right in like 1972 in COBOL or whatever, and it’s far wiser to do hardware maint to keep the same code running than to attempt a rewrite!
Point is that in my first example, yes, the bad product really •was• better. “Compared to what?” and “Toward what goal?” are both questions that can have very surprising answers.