Software is no longer sold; it's adopted | Hacker News Reader

Software is no longer sold; it's adopted

orbit.love

200 pointsmooreds86 comments

I think the hyper-focus on customer desires is a misstep. The best and most widely-adopted software in history has been software designed by a couple of visionaries (or at most a small team) who ignored what users _said_ they wanted and gave them what they needed instead.

Sure, but I think you have some survivor bias here. How many people turned out some software that they thought people needed but which nobody did? I don't have any examples at hand but it's gotta be a whole lot.

99% of github?

Ahh, an optimist!

> How many people turned out some software that they thought people needed but which nobody did?

Search "shutting down" on HN for a list: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Man... it's like a graveyard and the titles are tombstones.

I often think about how little code I've written over the decades is still being run. Not much.

It reminds me of what is important in life.

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women?

Can't beat the "shutdownify is shutting down".

The point is not that every opinionated piece of tool is good, the point is that the best ones are opinionated.

The best model I've read about this is to separate feedback loops into two categories:

Problem Discovery - listen to users to understand where they struggle, but ignore their proposed solution and desires (except to the point it helps you understand the problem they are attempting to communicate).

Solution Discovery - design a solution that addresses the problem, and validate it with real usage. Importantly not just talking, but users need to actually try it out.

Do you have a resource that explains this is more detail?

While not a direct response to the two-lane idea, if you're interested in exploring these processes in general, searching for "design process" will get you a ton of info. In much of the design world, though especially in UX, design process navel gazing is somewhat akin to tech stack navel gazing among web developers.

Ash Maurya - Running Lean

Cooper and Vlaskovits - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development

Someone using your product probably does have a decent grasp on what a good solution would be, at least from the point of view of the user interface. We built a product that's broken for their use case in the first place, what makes us think we'll get it right the second time without their input?

You don't have to do exactly what they suggest, but following that advice I'd expect to see a lot of solutions that miss the mark in subtle ways that would be really frustrating as a user. Sometimes people don't fully understand why "Do thing Y instead" would make it better, so it's not in their "Problems" section, but they for sure know that having the button do Y instead would solve it. It's probably worth thinking about and not ignoring.

Oh sure, you always need to listen to the requests - especially for existing systems.

I had one set of legacy workflows I once replaced that rough went like:

1) Export data from system A to a CSV.

2) Remove/reorder a few columns manually in excel

3) Get manual approval from a manager

4) Email to different department

5) Upload to system B via their import function

The request was to just give us an "export with the right format," thus replacing step 1 & 2. But we also heard complaints from the team doing step #5 that it was pointless and could be automated, and from the managers in #3 that really they used a simple rule that if X < Y approve otherwise deny.

So we thought we could build a workflow automation that connected the two systems via API, with an automated approval and flag those that didn't meet the rule for manual review.

So we propose this, everyone agrees. We build a pilot, test it, everyone likes it. Then go to release it and find out that this ignores any number of cases where in #2 there where hidden workflows like "any time you see scenario W, send it to Jenny and she runs a formula on these columns to adjust" or "actually the manager never approves anything from this department related to an acquisition because of factor x, and it needs to go to this different group." There was about a dozen similar requirements. Could we have identified these sooner? On other projects we usually did, but this project went further than most before they were detected.

We ended up temporarily building that export button requested by the users originally and were planning to fix the API based workflow ... but then there was a reorg and priorities shifted. We never came back to project and AFAIK those groups still work via email. But they don't do nearly as much excel busywork as before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think these kinds of generalizations are pretty absurd, as I can immediately think of counterexamples. Bourne shell (and by extension, bash) is by far one of the most common pieces of software used in the world, and has been hated by virtually everyone since it's release, including admissions by its own author that it is an inferior shell. It's certainly one of the most-widely adopted pieces of software in history; no shell comes anywhere close except maybe Microsoft DOS/cmd during a small time window.

I also think it's silly, but . . .

A generalization is not the same as a universal claim, which can be disproved with a single exception.

A generalization is about the shape of some statistical cloud. We have to show that it's not shaped that way to disprove it. So find enough exceptions and we're there. But how many are enough?

It's usually easiest (imho) to disprove these by showing a different generalization that is true, but conflicts with the given one.

I love the way you've formulated that concept. Thanks.

I made this account to dispute this garbage.

No other shell or programming language comes close out of the box at the versatility that Bash has. I say this after having searched high and low for shell programming languages, maintaining big bash projects for a multiple organizations.

There are idiosyncracies to java, c, go and rust too. This monoculture of bash is bad is tiring. Paired with the monoculture of go is the new hotness. I rewrote at 500 line python project in 100 lines of bash for more functionality, but at a cost of more external dependencies but they are system deps with a standard abi without having to deal with python. APL has its strengths where Go/Rust is terrible.

Just use the correct tool for the job. And no more of this monoculture. Diverse problems need diverse solutions

Not sure if that’s working as a counterexample.

Context matters, no? I didn't say bash was inferior to other Bourne-alike shells. I said Bourne-alike shells all suffer from a common problem - they have to implement a "language" that has inconsistencies in it.

A lot of people love bash, and a lot of people bash bash, but I'm personally aware that not "virtually everyone" hates it.

Maybe you mean visionaries started those projects. Did any remain relevant without significant user and designer input?

Standing up an idea well enough to change how people see a need is an incredible accomplishment but it's entirely different from single-handedly knowing how to make it work best for people who use it. Or for anybody other than you, really.

But underestimating the importance of, or even disdain for deliberate usability work is pervasive in FOSS. Most developers see interfaces as a place to expose the user-facing functionality so people can interact with your software. To a user, the interface is the software. In their estimation, bad interface=bad software.

When projects ignore that, they end up making Gimp.

You'll have a hard time selecting a sample of serious photo editors where fewer than 80% have tried Gimp— yet maybe %5 use it. Fewer will have heard of the younger commercial Affinity, but more will use it. (edit: obviously pulling those numbers out of my ass but I've been editing photos on computers since the early 90s and do so professionally to this day.)

However, in the adjacent and oft-overlapping world of vector art, the FOSS project Inkscape is very, very popular— even among professionals. They aren't hostile to usability changes, actively seek outside interface design perspectives and have a usable application because of it.

Inkscape does more good for a broad swath of vector artists because of their good design habits. Gimp has a product enjoyed by open source enthusiasts with light photo editing needs.

Free + great enough to generate word of mouth will trump expensive + great + advertising in almost every case.

That doesn't contradict this article.

They're talking about a bottom-up model of sales rather than top-down.

Selling to the end users of a platform rather than selling to the CIO/CTO.

This is particularly important now in the age where lots of SWEs won't take a job if the company is using teams/outlook and not slack.

I agree in part, at least the quote often applied to Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” rings true. But I think that only really applies to the core innovation, actually turning that into a viable business requires a lot of customer understanding and getting user feedback is key to that. Rob Fitzpatrick's book "The Mom Test" explains how to get actually useful feedback from users.

enterprise may have situations where changing workflows is often more expensive than paying for developers to tune software to their need, even including long term consideration about customized software maintenance.

it's not necessarily the best approach, but as long as there's money to be made out of it, there will be customer tailored software.

> How community drives software adoption

This is not a new thing. Microsoft famously said something like "we don't like software piracy, but we'd rather you pirate Windows than use something else". Adobe said the same about Photoshop.

I think in the case of Adobe the thinking was “a current pirate is a paying customer if we wait long enough”

This is true! I've come across many, many people who buy steam games just because they've pirated them in the past. They don't care about playing them, they're literally just buying them, because they didn't when they played them.

I feel that drive too, of paying for things that benefit me even when I'm not properly excluded from their use otherwise.

Let me give you an example.

California.

I was given a pretty terrible impression of state workers, government employees generally, for a very long time. And I still hear stories about many of them being really lazy, but that I've actually witnessed firsthand, dude, 5.0000 stars. Let me jog my memory and think when no...but that I can talk about...well the police at least, just awesome police. But that's just what I see with my own eyes, of course you have to take into account news. With police, them earning what they earn just doesn't seem that fucking expensive. The public libraries, just amazing, people don't realize the value of a library because they're everywhere in US and in Latin America they're not as good (fewer, farther between, less resources). There's more examples.

So at one point when filling out HR forms I notice the person I'm talking to skipped over two entries filled in by default with 0.00, and I asked what they were. Extra taxes! Do you want to pay extra taxes? Nobody fills them out!

I said yes, definitely, and it was great. I felt good knowing I supported the system that supported me, without exclusion. Like everyone says "the government should do this, I want this from the government, I shouldn't have to pay for this myself, my entitlement is not enough." What about, hey let's give the government what it needs on our end, like actually produce the wealth and be tax-docile instead of making it audit us (and let someone else come up with ideas of how to spend it).

It goes for everything, I pay even once the horse is out of the barn.

What?

Your government hates you and doesn't give a fuck about you. They misuse every dollar they get and use whatever means necessary to shove it into the bank accounts of their rich friends.

Please correct me if I'm just seriously misunderstanding you. Please!

You, for some reason, believe that willfully giving your government even more money is going to actually help you and other people around you.

I'm sorry ... what?

Where the heck are you located? Here on/near the East Coast, the poor counties around me have gotten free college for every high schooler with decent grades, the community college continues to expand without raising costs, Medicaid expanded to everyone under a certain income (I’m on it until my new job starts in the Summer, it’s AMAZING. No deductibles and they’ve stuck to it), the roads are continually getting wider, cops all have body cameras which helped the force remove a bad officer, and our metro is adding new stops. Everyone just got free state-of-the-art vaccines, N95s, at-home tests, etc…

> Your government hates you and doesn't give a fuck about you. They misuse every dollar they get and use whatever means necessary to shove it into the bank accounts of their rich friends.

Yeah exactly, that's what I used to believe. Couldn't have put it better myself. And all my sources confirm it, except for all my actual personal experiences. It's an internet versus real life thing. Depends on where you live.

This is probably also why both companies give out free licenses to primary and high school students (at least in Australia). It causes a positive feedback loop, where their software (e.g. photoshop) becomes the industry standard because most people have been taught to use it, and it is taught in schools because it is the industry standard.

Their data mining is far more valuable than a one-off license, I guess.

Witnessing the numerous FB Pages, Discord channels, and sub-Reddit communities focused on enterprise software, it seems communities will form organically, whether or not initiated by the company.

The most useful software communities I engage with tend to be the organically curated ones.

Yep, that's right. There's almost very little you can do directly to foster these communities, except to make your product delightful to use, and to add these wonderful experiences throughout your product, that makes ppl want to recommend it.

You could browse them and listen to feedback (but beware of implementing said feedback when it misaligns with sustainability).

I think communities (wherever they are), end up reflecting on the products/software. If you're a software company not actively working to manage and provide value to the community (whether in your platforms or elsewhere), those communities still reflect on the company. So probably best to actively work to maintain and provide value to them.

I ran one of those communities for a niche software product. I used to get a lot of grief from the developer because people would phone support and get incorrect information. Then they would post the same question to the community and get the correct answer. They should have seen it as a positive resource and a reason to do better but they hated it because they didn't control it.

It could be organic, though many companies have X Advocate role as initiator, and keep messing around like penetration agent (mole) inside community

"Community is the new pre-sales" makes me sick. It's already impossible to tell what fake or real in reviews. Now marketers are sliding themselves like rats into communities.

Be nice to the rats - they are fairly intelligent creatures with feelings you know.

That slid themselves into our communities and made us sick.

Hey I like rats, but he's not wrong in his choise of words.

Now rats are paying restitution as lab test animals and making us healthier.

Plus, they don't scurry when something bigger comes their way. Don't pack themselves together and run as one. Don't shit where they're not supposed to. Don't take what's not theirs. They don't compare.

We live in pist truth society trully, you dont know what is real politically or in products you buy

That's not the point being made in the article, though. It's not saying marketers should do community, but rather that companies should invest in community instead of marketing for mutual benefit (members and company). The follow-on Value Creation > Value Capture piece I think makes it clearer: https://orbit.love/blog/value-creation-beats-value-capture

Rats like to make hype and fad tech by writing articles they get paid to write, resulting in biased and inefficient tech adoption and adaptation as industry whole. I sympathize with lab rats though, they sacrifice life and make much more progress to humanity as helping advancing medicine although I support cruelty-free.

This doesn't seem remotely true. Look at the sales and marketing spend of ServiceNow, Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and countless others. There's tens to maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars being spent every year on selling software. All that money is being used to ram software down throats at the CISO/CIO level. It's another conversation as to whether it's worth it to spend all that money on sales, but it definitely doesn't translate to software the end users are choosing.

This feels like the 2000s again with the annoying enterprise software companies of that era. Perhaps the hangover of this will be another decade of new comers making software people actually want to use.

But how did those companies start?

Sure, you'll eventually need a salesforce when you get to that company size (330M in revenue in one quarter in 2022 for Snowflake: https://investors.snowflake.com/news/news-details/2021/Snowf... ).

The same is true with the other ones you mentioned. This post does a great job of explaining why: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-...

But for most companies starting out you can't hire an enterprise sales force (nor would they be effective). I don't know what size it makes sense to start hiring sales folks (don't have a ton of context) but my guess is by the time you have $10M/year in revenue, you have some kind of sales team.

But how can you drive adoption at the early-mid stages of a business? That's the question this post answers.

It depends on your field. If you're a services company (as in, consulting and subcontracting) you're dead in the water unless you have a sales team day 0, even if that sales team is just the founder working over time. Those places live and die by their contracts.

There's a large number of small (<5) person companies that work entirely like that. They're not _sexy_ and they're never going to be unicorns, but they make a good amount of money for the people involved when they inevitably get purchased by some larger group.

That is a good point. I would say that this post is not aimed at consulting companies, which typically don't have a community strategy (unless they are a participant in another organizations community as a way of driving business).

I know a couple of consulting companies that are doing just fine, but I agree, they'll need a sales team. Will they need an enterprise sales team? Probably not, it'll be the founders and once they get to a certain size a sales team. But not the kind of sales team that Snowflake has.

I've worked for a few sales driven companies in the past and usually there were two sales forces. There was an internal group focussed on telephone sales (they would probably be more email now). They were really just a step up from administration, accepting orders, sending out quotes, possibly generating leads.

Then there would be the real sales team who were out visiting customers and supported by the internal team. A lot of their work is keeping existing customers happy.

My gut feeling is you wouldn't have much success selling consulting via an internal team. Because of the nature of the work it is always going to be closer to the second group, more like enterprise sales.

What I find interesting now is how big some companies can get on the back of the first example. Google seems to be built on that.

Usually the founder is handling sales (as well as everything else) until it gets big enough.

For others I guess VC money will be used to jump start the business although I have no experience of that.

Really depends on your industry, the size of your company, etc.

This makes sense for some subset. It doesn't make sense for large enterprise HR software, financial ERP software, prison management software, anything where lots of people use it in an administrative manner and it is by nature boring.

exactly, this line in particular sounds ridiculous with those counter examples in mind.

>In this product-led world, folks won't simply use whatever tool they're given. They want to use the same tools at work as they choose to use in their own time.

I do think PLG is taking over most software

We need yo kill SaaS. It was a better world when you sold software and the license. Be it in physical form or digital. In the world we have now you lose access to your info the moment you don't pay. This has already caused countless businesses to go under. Especially since covid. People need to wake up.

I wonder if this new trend of software needing periodic payment to function will boost FLOSS adoption.

For me personally, absolutely.

I loathe subscriptions. It is the mental overhead. Since the shift to subscriptions, my personal spending on software is down something like 80% from what it was ca. 2015.

Replacements mainly have been open source software or things I've written.

For me it depends on what that subscription entails. Personally I only pay for the Jetbrains toolbox because it also includes a rolling perpetual license so if I ever do walk away from it I'm not leaving the software behind, just updates.

But the perpetual one is a year behind what you are currently using, so that makes it hard to walk away :-)

And you will want the latest release so you can keep up with the latest features in the languages and frameworks.

>For me personally, absolutely.

Business likes it though.

No,

On the consumer side Office 365 offers a lot of functionality that requires a server component.

On the other hand, who will work on polished software for end users for free?

> On the other hand, who will work on polished software for end users for free?

Man we're so over that... do you know what FLOSS means? Most FLOSS used today (and it is used in or to develop mostly everything you use) is developed by paid developers.

You sound like bill gates in his open letter to hobbyists: "What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

And how many companies are still paying “subscriptions” for open source software either for support and/or hosting on a cloud provider?

But, where is the open source popular equivalent to Office365 and Adobe’s software suite - the user facing software?

And companies that were trying to create a business around open source software are rapidly retreating to close source licenses like ElasticCo and MongoDB.

> And how many companies are still paying “subscriptions” for open source software either for support and/or hosting on a cloud provider?

FLOSS is an enabler of almost all SaaS there is today. With regards to support or consultancy, that's is how Canonical, SuSE and (for the most of its existence) RedHat survived. There also minor examples, like Collabora maintaining LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. These are just from the top of my head.

> But, where is the open source popular equivalent to Office365 and Adobe’s software suite - the user facing software?

Equivalent to these... I really fail to provide, but consider many user-facing polished FLOSS like Blender, Krita, Inkscape, Firefox, Chromium, Audacity... Some of them have sustainable market segments, some of them are not as advanced as proprietary options; but most important: some of them are more popular/used them proprietary alternatives and a good enough for most people.

Software hasn't been actually sold in decades.

It's all "licensed", which isn't the same as "sold".

When I sell you something, it's yours.

When I license you something, it's still mine but you're allowed to use it.

It is well marketing written, but don't match reality. I'm sorry but most companies have Teams not Slack, most companies have Teams not Zoom.

> From Slack to Figma, Typeform to Twilio, Atlassian to Airtable... many of today's fastest-growing companies are those who are not only product-led but community-driven.

Atlassian is clearly not product-led today and they are clearly not one of today's fastest growing company

> vendors have had to adapt to this new landscape. Go-to-market strategies have changed with sales-led replaced with product-led. [...] they've adjusted their budgets accordingly. Take Atlassian, for example; in 2020, their Sales and Marketing spend was 18.6% of revenue compared to an industry average of 38.7%

Atlassian as always been famous for being no-Sales, so this is clearly not a shift for them

Right. In 2016, Sales & Marketing was 19% of revenue, so Atlassian was always a low spender on sales. Narrative violation.

Sure but how were they no-Sales? I used to work for an Atlassian consultancy and Atlassian put a ton of effort into their partner network. We would run Atlassian user groups, answer questions on their forums, etc. It was a community-based strategy, they were just earlier than most to it.

They are not completely no-sales. I don’t think any big enterprise software co above $1b market cap is

In VCs, there is a technical term for this called "Product Led Growth" (PLG).

Prominent examples are Figma, Slack and Zoom.

More info: https://www.getcorrelated.com/blog/what-is-product-led-growt...

This isn't just PLG though, it's taking things a step further by layering on community that changes the go-to-market motion and not just business model. Corinne Marie Riley has an interesting article on this, too: https://corinneriley.medium.com/community-led-growth-the-pro...

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

product-led is just a marketing term led by sales people who don’t have a clue about how to formulate „product quality matches needs of users“ </rant>

I think product-led is not simply ensuring you have product-market fit, or whether you're satisfying the needs of users. It goes further than that. It's to ensure every step/detail of your product is built to encourage people to want to recommend it, or talk about it. Every small detail, from the cute mascot you might use in your logo, to features that help people express their identity, or feel good about themselves. Of course, it varies from product to product.

The market is filled with tons of products that fulfills the needs of users. But very few of them have a community of enthusiastic users that want to recommend it to others.

exactly.

and good products without a mascot have been recommended in the past, just because they are good products.

There is more to it though. Like PLG encourages a freemium approach, to maximize the number of folks who can experience the product quality. As well as things like aligning user outcomes to business outcomes through usage-based pricing.

Software is there to solve a business problem and is used for such. Companies do not want to spend labor where it's not needed so you do end up with communities growing around specific software tools for a particular need. The Linux kernel for example. Every company want a COTS solution so they don't need to specialize and produce their own. Software is a zero sum game where commodity features aren't paid for but customization is. Only huge companies with big R&D budgets can make substantial software investments. As soon as a commodity solution is reached then the business problem is solved and isn't paid for and people lose their jobs. It's the whole reason AI is big to replace software investment in the long run.

> the experience has to be stellar - they'll ditch products just as quickly if they aren't working for them.

That’s why all these companies build silos: to make changing painful.

> They want to use the same tools at work as they choose to use in their own time.

Well, there was a time when this used to be the other way round. (Insert your preferred version of o tempora o mores here.)

I'm so old I payed for shareware and demoware.

It always was; the "software market" was always fake.

"In soviet Russia, software adopt you!"

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