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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Start looking for "real stuff" you can improve with tech, rather than just software/apps that're hard to defend.

To that end, I often recommend that developers go and find jobs outside of traditional software businesses for a while. If you spend a few years writing code for a publishing house or an oil company you'll see more of the challenges that affect those businesses that you can apply software to. If you spend your entire career working in a software company it's unlikely you'll realise that these problems exist because (generally speaking) software companies have already realised they're a problem and addressed them.

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This isn't just a good idea for those interested in improving or taking over an industry. It's also a good way to expand your own personal understanding of the world. I know from experience - I've worked for the USGS, for a sports advertising startup, for a newspaper, and for a beauty products marketing company.

They all have had very different outlooks on the world.

So true. I built a website for a company that works with heavy equipment rental business frequently, including going to their trade shows. One of the recurrent themes is how bad the software is.

The flooring industry is another place that might be ripe for "disruption", the software often sucks.

>> The flooring industry is another place that might be ripe for "disruption", the software often sucks.

Actually anything in the building industry is ripe for disruption. I've worked with architects and every single firm has a different way of handling documents and change order requests.

There's actually a TON of companies that still use paper trails for change order requests. Some use dropbox, some use SFDC (salesforce.com), some use some archaic cloud storage solutions. It's literally all over the map. And every time one of my firms works with a new sub-contractor then they have to try and sync up how they all handle their project documents - its insane.

If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market. I mean, think of how many companies are involved designing and building a house.

>> If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market.

Not necessarily. Convincing people to fit their workflow into your new software, effectively running their companies around it, is not as easy as it sounds. Coding it is not the hard part.

> Coding it is not the hard part.

Truer words have never been said. Selling your vision/workflow/business structure/data presentation is the hard part. Many of the things one may code as a solution will directly and negatively effect the job security of the exact person your are selling to, but that is the challenge. The secondary effect is a chilling of innovation by limiting the automation gains/improvements in some way to limit the impact of value depreciation of current workers.

As someone with a failed B2B company in CV, can confirm. Also, don't think that you just need to sign a contract with a suit — it's only the beginning. Your toughest challenge will be getting their lazy and unmotivated IT department to actually do anything.

Shoot, I work as a professional services consultant doing software setup/hardware installs for a major tech company (actually the market leader in our niche) and all the time I get pushback from the engineers I'm working with who are resistant to change. If I had a nickel for every time I heard "we didn't choose this software" or "management is making us use this", I'd just about double my salary.

I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.

It's not just a challenge with your startup trying to get name recognition. It's a challenge for the major players, too. Inertia is hard to overcome.

> I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.

Did they need any of those features, or did they need to search?

> If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market.

Yep, they're already on it: https://www.procore.com/

I am doing maintenance for some software in roofing industry. The software was written 25 years ago and it sux in so many ways. My first reaction was that it would be very very easy to make much better version of this software and take the market (other solutions sux in same way).

After working on it for past 9 years I can say that the software might looks very simple on the outside, but then you find a lots of proprietary data that are really hard to get (say the information how many man-hours will take laying down the some kind of roof using some type of technology process) and some partnership that will make it quite hard do as an outsider.

I am not saying the disruption is impossible, but it could be very hard and just a better software itself will not help.

On a somewhat tangential note, I worked as a cook in a restaurant while in high school and it was an eye opening experience. If I ever have children I'm going to ensure they have similar life experiences early on.

Does one really have to go work there for a few years? Aren't there other ways of immersing yourself deeply ?

Is there another way of immersing yourself deeply in Spanish without going to a Spanish speaking country? Not really. It's the same concept really, it gives you an entirely different outlook on things. There are complex problems out there that a lot of people in big companies still don't know that can be solved with software.

Also to say no apps or games will be able to hit it big... Well, just look at Pokémon Go.

would Pokémon Go succeed if it wasn't based on an already popular franchise?

In this now-tortured analogy, think of the existing industry as the "already popular franchise."

Probably not. Niantec's previous augmented reality game, Ingress, was not even close to as popular, despite having most of the same gameplay characteristics. Working with the Pokemon franchise was a brilliant move.

It's not just the popularity of the franchise. The game would not have worked nearly as well with, say, the Star Wars franchise.

The reason it worked is because Pokemon itself is about traveling to different places and finding rare pokemons. That's literally the app - there is 100% congruence.

Like you said, it's about travelling and finding Pokemon. That's what kids who saw the anime and played the game wanted to be able to do. Pokemon GO delivers on that desire.

I think it also helps that Pokemon GO simplified the experience from Ingress which makes it more accessible to a wider variety of people.

I agree with both of you. I didn't mean to imply it was just any random franchise agreement that made the difference and that there were no improvements to gameplay. The integration with the pokemon world and improved game play accessibility are two things that made working with that franchise in particular brilliant. Working with the Star Wars franchise would not have been brilliant. Although with the success of pokemon go I expect there will be a lot more themed games in the future.

I think the success of Pokemon GO will open up people to the possibilities of AR apps and hopefully, we'll see more apps that use AR and the GPS in innovative ways.

There will always be apps (and particularly games) to hit it big. Stop this End of History crap.

I would say yes, as physically being on the inside gives you access to all of the nuances of a particular industry. Outside consulting companies and contractors have a hard time encapsulating these subtleties and, as such, is a major reason as to why enterprise software written for a specific industry is generally quite terrible.

> Aren't there other ways of immersing yourself deeply ?

Side projects.

Finding a co-founder/business partner with deep experience in the industry. (Worked for me.)

I completely agree. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday on this exact point.

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