Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software | Hacker News Reader

Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software

shankarganesh.blog

43 pointsshankarganesh54 comments

Can you think of another mainstream video calling software that’s as good as Zoom, for consumers?

FaceTime, circa 2010.

Styluses to capacitive touch. Taxis to Ubers. Torrents to Netflix. MP3s to Spotify

Since when were torrents, MP3s, and styluses anything to do with business software?

The trend of business adoption of “consumer” tech had basically one standout example, which was the shift from Microsoft to Apple products in mobile. People wanted iPhones for themselves and their IT departments didn’t have a clue how to handle that at first. You could maybe point to adoption of GPUs for ML as another clear example of a current wave of consumer tech to business adoption.

These trends ebb and flow over time. People have used business software for personal reasons since forever. See: the abuse of spreadsheets over the past 40 years.

This confused me too at first, but I think it's being used as an example of improvements in consumer software compared to prior consumer software that the author feels business software would be unlikely to have done.

Who ever mentions Zoom under such a headline and then cannot think of anything better must have a pretty limIted experience with software and must have been living under a rock lately. Don't remember Zoombombing? What about the fact, that Zoom planned to limit encryption to only business customers?

Also we discover that Facebook for business is good apparently (it isn't) and also this is consumer software taking over the business world i.e completely the opposite phenomenon. Also the writer believes choices like this to be rational, instead of shitty managers with nothing to do trying things to justify their paycheck and consumers acting like heard animals installing anything that's free and is something everyone else is getting. I didn't choose zoom for the UI, I had to install it cos I have to cos everyone is using it because its free and not completly dreadful.

You are describing the well known "network effect".

Agreed–also personally I find the UX of Zoom to be really awful. Having helped a bunch of new-to-Zoom people get set up with it in the past few months it almost feels like they never did any user testing at all.

While I admit, the OP/author didn't choose the best examples and could have researched more. And also, there are still plenty of crappy business apps out there. (To the troll comments, neither Oracle nor SAP are modern by any account. Oracle predates the internet).

I will also say that the OP is right about this trend. If I had to pick between two equals, with equivalent SLAs/privacy/other business considerations, I'd pick the tool that's easier to use and onboard. An easier to use tool means my team spends less time struggling and more time being productive and happy!

Think AWS vs GCP. AWS is older, clunkier with a terrible UX and GCP is modern , aesthetically pleasing, gets out of your way and innovative (cloud console FTW).

JIRA is from a time before this trend started, but ClickUp is a JIRA/Confluence/Trello alternative that faster, modern and easier to use.

Notion is another great example. It's a business tool diguised in consumer clothings. It's so well designed, easy to use and massively customizable that it serves both use-cases equally well (at least for me).

While Dropbox started out as a consumer app, Box was business centric from the get go and has a really good UX. Same goes for Quip, that's an alternative to Google docs for business that was eventually acquired by Salesforce. It's UX was way ahead of it's time.

And there's Shopify! It's a dream to use for setting up an online store, compared to any of its predecessors.

So in spirit, the OP is right.

> Notion is another great example. It's a business tool diguised in consumer clothings

I would say it's the opposite. Notion is a consumer app that's so customizable that it's started to compete with business tools.

By your logic, Microsoft Word is a "business software" in this context. Also you could say the same about iPhone, that it's a "business tool disguised as a consumer device". They are not. It's the other way around. All these companies target consumer market, but because they have designed them well and are powerful, they can be used in business use cases.

How does he go from "Zoom is great" to "Business software is so good now, that it's competing with consumer software"?

His only supporting example is Zoom. Then he goes on to generalize the shit out of it which is not really that convincing.

Zoom succeeded in consumer space because of COVID, period. Good for them, but I don't like people who spin stories. Even before covid I've known about Zoom for a while as some nerdy videoconferencing software, but never saw it as a high quality consumer app.

I know a lot of folks who heavily use Trello to organize their personal lives.

He's wrong about Slack, though. That mindshare among people who don't already use Slack at work, and even among many who do, belongs overwhelmingly to Discord.

But Trello was designed as the opposite of prevailing business tools at that time and part of that was that consumer use cases (e.g. college projects) were mentioned often in earlier examples, so it's hard to claim it as an example of a business tool migrating to consumer use.

Its taken a more business first approach since the atlassian acquisition for sure, but that wasn't always the exclusive focus.

It wasn't always the exclusive focus, but I think it was always the primary focus. After all, it came out of Fog Creek Software (now Glitch); given their product history, Trello would stand out as the only consumer-focused product they'd ever released, had they actually released it as one.

As I recall the original marketing (imperfectly, I'm sure, as it's been quite a while ago now), the pitch was focused around the concept of a project management tool without the usual overheads and complexities such tools tend to bring along, something you could just jump into and start using. "And you can even use it for stuff outside of work!" might've been there also, I don't doubt it, but I have to think it would've been secondary at best.

I agree, I'm not saying it's a 50/50 split. But I think consumers were at least considered in the design process for Trello, which is the not the case for Zoom.

And then there is the massive population of people who burned their productivity with last generation's chat apps and do not dare allow chat productivity destroying software into their workplaces.

> His only supporting example is Zoom.

As another well-known example, the hottest new teen sexting app is currently Google Docs.

wow i had no idea, where can i learn more?

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/14/youll-never-guess-what-app...

Microsoft Office use to be $600 and only businesses paid for it. Everyone else either pirated it or use a consumer “Works” product. At $99/year for 6 users, it works across all of your devices and gives each user 1TB of storage. Many consumers use it and pay for it now.

The Adobe Photoshop bundle gained more mainstream buyers when they went subscription.

As far as Zoom, I agree. To a close approximation, every adult has FB in the US so Messenger has been the go to app for friends and family. Besides your contacts are already there.

The strategy talked about here is called “land and expand” - get some users hooked for personal or hobby use-cases with free trial, and they’ll want to bring your product in to work. Get a single small team in a business, and they’ll become your best salespeople to their peers and managers. If your user experience is good enough, your product will sell itself virally within an organization. Slack did a great job of this.

In my experience the best software is the one that no longer distinguishes between the markets. For example, I've just found the Serif Affinity graphics software suite. Each of their programs can be used as substitute for ten times more expensive Adobe software and is good enough for professionals (with caveats and limitations, I suppose) but at the same time is affordable enough for non-professional consumers.

Recently, almost the whole pro audio market has shifted in a similar way. They realized that they can make more money by targeting hobbyists and musicians instead of studio owners, so now most companies offer 70% to 90% sales from time to time. Others have started to launch software at a tenth of the price that used to be normal - $30 instead of $300.

I prefer that to the "free plus pro" version model. But I admit that I have no clue about marketing and sales and don't know the downsides of aiming at consumer and professionals at the same time.

Consumer software is so bad now, that business software is competing with it.

I just installed Oracle DB to help my mum with managing her recipes. It's really improved her TTT (Time to table).

No child was ever disowned for choosing Oracle!

That's because there wasn't anything to inherit once the Oracle audit was done, right?

Telling my children now that they would become the first, if they did this. In our house we use PostgreSQL.

I use Oracle DB for managing my daily to-do list. I'll never miss a task again!

Went with SAP to keep in contact with granny. She has her rolodex organized now, it is a blast.

Good for you, I just spent 500m euro to get my family onto SAP turned out strategic goals for my family did not align and we had to cancel.

wouldn't sqlite do the job just fine?

What kind of heathen uses SQLite? Praise our Lord and Saviour Larry Ellison <3.

...I do

learned it from CS50.

Your child might need 'My First Timesheet'

Obviously this person hasn't tried Jitsi. The whole article reads like an ad for Zoom.

I'm surprised the author and no one has mentioned Telegram Messenger, they are very huge. The simple appearance of it makes it perfect for personal & professional use, it looks more inviting than Discord and Slack, imo.

I know a lot of businesses (non-tech) in India who use WhatsApp groups for talking to their teams. But it's the other way round - consumer software getting adopted by teams isn't it?

I found it odd that he doesn't mention Stripe which is excellent in B2B. Its true that we are using Zoom extensively and it works well. But that's just one software. Almost all of my work apps suck apart from Zoom. Especially the HR/Salary portals are terrible to use in almost all companies I have worked so far. Ex: ZingHR loads for more than 10seconds to show anything useful. The UI looks like it was made with a default styling from one of the many frameworks available online.

> At one point, business software had no choice but to stop being clunky and terrible to use, because nobody wanted to walk into work to use shitty software.

There’s still a lot of clunk out there in some industries. Maybe it’s just legacy software and an unwillingness to change, but my life as a lawyer at a large law firm involves a lot of clunky software and a poor laptop with its fans permanently spinning from it.

Nice article. I'd love to see examples of people using slack for personal life. Don't know anyone who does this.

A bit of an edge case, but I recently managed to move all my important conversations with friends to Discord - except for one friend who didn't use it. Since he also works in tech, we just made a Slack workspace for the two of us. I actually find it quite nice to have different channels for each topic that we're mutually interested in.

Slack and Discord are my two favorite chat platforms right now so I'm very happy with the way this all worked out.

I absolutely refuse to use Discord ever again after they started requiring phone verification. I'm tired of every company under the sun wanting all kinds of information from me that have nothing to do with what I need their service for. It's frustrating that it's become so popular.

Phone verification is the cheap and easy way to stop spam/malicious actors, plus you get a unique identified to track people with. I imagine it's here to stay in the short term.

Slack was a godsend for medium to large sized hobby communities and student organizations. At UC Berkeley, the groups I was part of switched from IRC (for the nerds) and consumer group text products to Slack. There was (and still might be?) a large hobby community using it, although I think Discord largely owns the space now in the consumer market.

I use Discord for business communication.

Slack is not a good example for this headline. Loads of chat applications are much better than Slack. Slack sucks. Slack is chosen by business people, who heard about it from their business friends and ignore input from their tech team.

Examples:

Discord - but terrible data policy as well, but at least works fluently without long load times and they managed to use webrtc in 2020, which Slack still sucjs at and gives you BS about using Firefox and limits It for the free account. Ridiculous.

Zulip Chat - Much better chat functionality and conversation model. Can be self hosted.

Anything with a proper Markdown parser, not something that sucks as much as whatever Slack is using. Oh well, but it could be worse looks at Atlassian Confluence.

Anything that does not heat up 4 Cores at 100% at startup for an inapproprIate amount of time.

Anything respecting your privacy.

Keybase (now zoom)? Matrix(getting better all the time)?

I'm on a couple of social Slacks. The most active is me + three others, all of whom live pretty close to each other, and we've been using it to stay in touch while not seeing each other in person and also while not blowing up phones with notifications (i.e., other IM mechanisms will ping us in real time).

I think we mostly ended up on Slack because we already use it in other contexts - if we didn't, we might have gone for some other IM system.

I have a private, premium slack with ~20 of my closest friends from college, which I set up in March when we all were sent home from campus. It replaces many many disparate group chats and fits our need for customizable text-and-image chatrooms, voice and video calls, and support for mac, windows, linux, android, and iOS, with machines of vastly different levels of power and quality (although it could be a little more lightweight to help out low-tier computers).

Why pay for Slack when you could setup a Discord server for free?

Lol have you ever used Quickbooks, and have to integrate their API to your server? It’s clusterfuck and their server down like once a week.

I work for a enterprise (yes boring write code to generate pdf report from database etc), integration with business software API always gave us headache.

I mean it's getting a lot better isn't it? I'm sure there's someone already building a QuickBooks which you don't have to struggle with so much, to use.

Zoom is not business software. Even slack barely is. Both have free version for the masses which is crucial to their success. A fair comparison would be with something that does not have free tier.

It's bottom-up business software. Apparently this is a common approach in B2B these days. Figma is another example of bottom-up B2B software.

The author has never had a look at any of Atlassian's business software.

Atlassian has grown large by producing business software that can be described as "low quality" at best!

Yeah, only listing one example, I.e. Zoom, especially when that example has numerous faults such as poor privacy, kind of nullifies whatever point the article was trying to make.

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