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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

Personally I’m not even thinking about software companies, I’m talking about the vast majority of companies out there in countless industries.

It’s just not possible to have a good generic app to serve all of them. There’s just too much variety in workflows and edge cases to capture them all, and few companies will change the way they work to accommodate the opinionated workflow of some productivity vendor.

The best solution is still to build custom applications for each company, molded around the way they work, and owned by them 100%, so they can feel fully confident that the product will not disappear or change in ways they don’t like.

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On non-tech setups, such systems are called ERP systems. The its a mature multi-billion dollar market with hundreds of entrenched players. The moment an application like Asana tries to cross that threshold, they get compared to the ERP products that are designed to handle specific workflow.

ERP products lack flexibility and generally have very poor user experience (since the buyers are not the users). I think there is a separate place for both these products and it depends on the organization when the switch from one domain to another.

Thank you for that term ERP, I hadn’t heard it before but it describes precisely what I’m talking about.

I think it boils down to tradeoffs. For example- The best option (custom solution) may cost you 100k and drives max productivity. But if Asana (a more one size fits all product) costs you 20k and drives about 70% of max productivity - Asana might be the better option if the additional 30% productivity is not worth 80k.

The risk with Asana though is vendor lock in. If your business comes to depend on Asana too much you’re at the mercy of whatever they do, including “shutting down and going out of business”.

The other solution, and a better one IMHO, is to extend the 80% product using their APIs. I'm not familiar with Asana but Trello has fantastic APIs including webhooks all that events in the tool can trigger activity in your integration.

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