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Close your eyes. Pick a direction randomly. Point. What are you pointing at? You're pointing at something that took over a billion dollars of software to get to your door. Software at the exchange, at the bank, at the office, at the factory, on the loading dock, on the ships, controlling the trucks, in the supply chain, running the register, in your car.

No, web is not the last refuge of software, and $20/mo. is not a high price point.

nor is free/month; yet FB has a $50B valuation.

Enron was worth quite a bit at one point, too.

Oh, absolutely.

Before my current job I had no idea of the sort of money that corporations would throw at enterprise software if it filled an need.

We have an enterprise product in a under-developed market; in the first six months we pushed prices up literally 1000 fold without any drop in interest.

I've observed this even in competitive markets.

Enterprise is a seriously seriously big money spinner; you're looking at more cash in a single sale than some of the exits we see.

EDIT: and the irony is that most of this software is not particularly hard to build. A lot of it is just databases with a front end on it; the only bar to entry is being able to work your way through the policy document/guideline/law that you are providing a tool for and figure out what is needed. After struggling to throw together relatively complex web apps for a couple of years, this sort of development is almost cheating :D

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."

- from the Tao of Programming

Our company charges $250k. Per CPU.

Yes, I didn't believe it either.

And this is just one of the many line items.

According to VC, some of our bigger customers didn't take us seriously until we charged the money they were used to paying.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

The problem with building enterprise (highly-domain specific business) software is that to start, you need to know that a problem exists.

You won't find this information on the Internet or even in books. You need someone with very deep domain knowledge and the insight to recognize that a problem exists, that it has a possible solution, and that the solution has a larger market it can be sold to. The people who know all that, and are willing to take a risk and start a company around it are rare. If you're a programmer, find and work with them.

Would you recommend working for enterprises to find out what sort of software they need, or can you just ask them?

The way I have found works is this; find a consultant who charges a lot of money to go and do X at a company (and who has a lot of business).

Figure out a way for a company to do most of X itself with some software whilst still leaving some "wrapping up" or auditing for consultants to do.

Convince consultant to come onboard with their expertise to help develop the software (revenue sharing deal). He/she becomes a ready made sales person once launched.

Price product at fraction of the cost of getting consultant to do the work (i.e. instead of 100K - price it at 10K).

Thanks!

Any tips on the "find a consultant who charges a lot of money to go and do X at a company" stage? Do consultants have conventions or anything like that?

Do you mean "is not particularly hard to build"?

ugh, yep I did - edited. Thanks for the catch :) it's late and I've been typing a report for the last 5 hours or so ;)

TPS?

Heh, no thank goodness. 10,000 word systems engineering essay. An attempt at getting more edification in my spare time :)

> I am almost certain that non-web software brings in much more revenue than web software.

Most web companies would kill (but not alas sell their startup soul) for the average 10 - 15% of the initial license fee for enterprise software that big companies pay annually for ongoing support, maintenance and upgrades. Similarly, I just heard of another iPhone app that clears $6,000 a month. And it's not even at the top of its list when you search by the niche keyword. Some of the decent cash-flow being made in the App Store is never blogged about.

The six percent sales commission that top enterprise salespersons can get on a seven figure deal can easily eclipse a startup's lifetime revenues. Enterprise software is hard because it deals with real world complexity. Consider a payroll system. How do you deal with exceptions? The employees who are grandfathered and get certain perks. The Quasi-legal employment contracts.

There is a famous saying that if you buy SAP software you fit your company around the software. That is you adjust your internal processes and controls to meet The One True SAP Way.

Dangerous? Really? What is in danger of happening? A bunch of startups failing?

Seriously, I don't understand that part. I'm not sure I understand your main point either, come to think of it. Non-web software matters? I don't think that was disputed.

Web software doesn't deserve the focus it gets on HN because it almost always starts out sans business model, and then half of the population never figures it out, and the other half does, and of that half, 2/3 fail to execute? If anything, that's a description of a pretty exciting, if somewhat high-variance, domain.

Debt and reputational risk and opportunity cost.

shhhhhhhhh. Lets keep this as our big open secret. Let all the young hotshots chase after then next viral twitface/linkbook mashup web 3.0 dohicky while the rest of us mine the huge seams of paydirt in the unglamourous enterprise space.

I think a good part of it is mindset, a lot of the people on here are engineers. I know where to start when building a big complicated thing, but when it comes to getting a 3 million dollar PO... I'm out of my league.

I agree with your assessment.

And wish your friend much good luck for when - not if - he will try to find a job again.

My thoughts exactly, and that works out of WinForms as well. Not sure how many here realize how many places rely on tools such as BMC Remedy, .Net etc!

Funny point: the non-web companies I do freelancing for are totally ok with me using MongoDB, Ruby, JRuby or whatever does the job. They mostly don't care (in my case at least).