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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Booking appointments is one of those areas that suffers terribly from a lack of network effects. Since it is so easy to create a new booking system, there are millions of different ones - your dentist probably uses a way different system from your doctor, for instance, never mind another dentist.

Because it’s easy to create a booking system, making a translation layer between systems is hard. There is no natural incentive for these booking systems to standardize, because each has its constituent users, and none of them are complaining.

So, for now, and probably for a long time to come, booking will be done by humans.

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Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices. Then imagine them giving away cheap tablets to run it on....

>Now imagine what would happen if Google swooped in and gave one away for free and said it would easily integrate with Android and iOS devices.

Very little.

The overwhelming majority of businesses won't switch their booking system unless they have a truly compelling reason. A large proportion of small businesses still use pen-and-paper to manage their bookings and have no intention of changing.

There is still a non-trivial market for dot-matrix printers and NCR paper. Many national retail chains use terminal emulators for their Point of Sale systems. For perfectly understandable reasons, businesses tend to be very conservative about their technology choices. Their current solution might not be perfect, but they know that it works, for a value of "works" that is compatible with their business remaining profitable. They know from experience that new technologies are often more trouble than they're worth.

People would have said the same about payment systems before Strype came along....

Here is an example of who I think you’d have a hard time convincing: I’ve been going to the same hair stylist for about 22 years. Her clients have followed her as she moved around salons in Cupertino. She’s busy enough that many of her clients (including me) sit down at the beginning of the year and book an entire year’s worth of appointments. She only accepts checks or cash.

She’s popular enough that she has felt no market pressure to start accepting payment cards, and certainly has not had any trouble staying busy.

I think there’s a huge chunk of small/single-person businesses that will continue to do things using paper simply because they don’t want to change and they have enough clients that they don’t need to. Once they retire/expire they may be replaced by people that are more amenable to such things.

Do you think she would be patient enough to work with a less than perfect automated voice controlled system?

I think she’d be open to the idea, it’s not like she’s actively refusing business. Taking some reservations from a computer voice is a lot less change and (more importantly), it’s not change she has to initiate.

They already have. https://support.google.com/reserve/answer/7514650?hl=en

Coverage is spotty. It's crazy how much people here underestimate the lack of willingness of many business to use these systems. I live 45 minutes away from SF and recently got a haircut at a decently popular place and it was cash only. Adoption of new technology by small businesses is really slow.

I agree with the sentiment about slow adoption, but in this case, it might not make sense to switch.

If it's decently popular and is fully booked, going cash only would reduce their costs and either give them healthier profits or let them charge less. Most businesses accept cash and card, so they likely already have the daily task of taking money to the bank or having it picked up by a secure truck.

I'd suspect a cash-only business of tax evasion before technophobia.

They would generate some excitement, get marginal marketshare, quietly stop updating the system, let it languish for a few years, then just ghost the system?

And then imagine them shutting it down, and costing vendors billions to replace it.

now there are 17 competing standards...

... clarification: by humans I mean the receptionists, not the Google Duplex.

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