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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

There no money in tools: The Dutch company ASML would like to talk to you.

The article does actually say that in highly specialised niches tool making is fantastically lucrative. So, don't mistake the headline for ground truth.

Also there is good reason to believe tool making since flint knapping has been high status, and demands surplus production to liberate skilled labour to making tools which have immensely high use value: tools are magnifiers of human productivity and are worth a lot.

The point is that when commodities are cheap, and tools like gdb can be considered a commodity, the relative advantage of "a better one" has to be weighed up with using a screwdriver as a hammer. Thus printf() debugging.

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Well said. I know there's money in tools because I've been making money making and selling tools for a long time.

But not every kind of tool. A gdb replacement would be a hard sell unless it managed to actually perform miracles. But specialty tools of the sort that can save a relatively small group of devs major pain and/or time? There's good money in that for a small business. That the market is too small to be attractive to large companies is just gravy.

Time-travel seems miraculous to me, but uptake seems very slow to me.

I hope https://www.replay.io/ succeeds.

Commercially available time travel debugging is over 20 years old at this point [1]. So yeah, the uptake is pretty slow.

[1] http://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/1564

>Well said. I know there's money in tools because I've been making money making and selling tools for a long time

Couldn't a succesful actor say the same? "I know there's money in acting, because I've been making money acting for a long time".

And yet we'd instantly understand that doesn't refute the sense the statement was meant, and that acting isn't really the field you wanna pursue if you want to make money".

Same for any other niche endeavor, where there are thousands more lucrative fields and niches, and much fewer succesful examples compared to other areas.

> acting isn't really the field you wanna pursue if you want to make money

That depends on the person. By the same token, software engineering isn’t the right field for the average person (because most people don’t have the knack for coding), and yet some people find they do have that talent.

A career is like dating, it’s mostly about finding a good fit, which means you also need to know yourself. Once you do, you may find a ‘bad’ niche is actually the right one for you.

No, it depends on supply and demand. Lots of people want to act. Lots of people want to make tools.

And some are successful.

Which is irrelevant when evaluating a job market.

Some are succesful in any crap market, where the chances are that most will go under or utterly fail, and where the conditions and average salaries and profit margins and such are attrocious.

"Some are succesful" as some kind of retort basically translate to "I don't care about market conditions, I have confidence in myself and I know I'll be one of the succesful ones".

Which is all well and good, but it doesn't say anything about one's chances of success, or that job market's behavior in general. Besides, historically it's what every fresh-eyed kid fresh off the bus from Nebraska, still waiting tables 20 years later, believed too.

What I reject is evaluating the a job maket and completely ignoring the market participant, treating them as interchanagable.

Sure, many people suffer from self delusion, but that doesnt mean that their individual characteristics are meaningless.

If Jeff Bezos wanted to make tools, with all the power and money he has, he would have a much better chance than the average market participant.

>That depends on the person

Yes, that's the fallacy/issue I was addressing.

It's a market, and we try to evaluate it as a market, and talk about its characteristics.

Not about whether "if you're the next Brad Pitt you'd make millions".

I don't understand what fallacy you were addressing, honestly. I was not asserting that making tools is a large market that can support a larger number of players. In fact, I think I acknowledged that it was not. But I don't understand the relevance of that to my original point.

>I don't understand what fallacy you were addressing, honestly

That a general statement about the statistical properties of something (in this case, the IT tooling market) is refuted by pointing out individual counter-examples. Those can only refuse absolute statements.

Though I'm afraid this is not even a logical error. Instead it's a reading comprehension error, people read "there's no money in tooling", and think the author means "nobody made or makes money from selling tooling".

The latter (absolute statement) is not what TFA means, nobody claimed is the case, and is totally irrelevant to what's discussed. As are counter-examples to it (everybody already knows there are counter-examples).

> Couldn't a succesful actor say the same? "I know there's money in acting, because I've been making money acting for a long time".

Yes. That even one person makes money doing a thing is strong evidence that it's possible to make money doing that thing. Whether or not doing that thing is something you should do is an entirely different question.

>Yes. That even one person makes money doing a thing is strong evidence that it's possible to make money doing that thing.

Which would be relevant if the question at stake was whether it's "possible or not".

As opposed to the question whether people should focus on that market as a good market, where relatively more opportunities and money are than other IT areas.

Or did you thought those writing the post didn't already know several examples of companies making money selling tooling, and they didn't change their point, because the possibility of it was never what they were talking about?

All a gdb replacement has to do to succeed is not require the binary to be codesigned.

What kind of tools do you build? I'd be interested in your opinion on what are the preconditions for tools to profitable.

IDA Pro competes with gdb and Ghidra and seems profitable enough:

https://hex-rays.com/IDA-pro/

Then you have the people who sold shovels and pickaxes to prospectors during the Gold Rush

ASML's crown jewels are not mere "tools", they are machines. It is bleeding edge technology and entirely irrelevant to a general discussion of economics of 'tool makers'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw

and GDB isn't a machine?

Anyone can make a GDB. Haven't you noticed? Superpowers are fighting over ASML..

computers & software have been subject to ITAR regulations since decades. The implication is that superpowers are fighting over code.

In the industry they are very literally called "tools". No one calls them "machines". E.g., "the fab is ordering another six EUV tools".

Similarly a lathe or vertical mill is "a machine tool". They're ideally suited for a very specific task in the process of making a thing. It's possible for something to be both a machine and a tool.

If we're being pedantic, the ASML tools (and indeed any modern wafer fabrication equipment) are also robots.

More related to the business of tool making broadly, however, the entire industry of semiconductor wafer fabrication equipment (WFE) is quite profitable and margins tend to be generous. Much of the industry is very technical and does involve "bleeding edge technology", but not all of it. The publicly traded Japanese company Disco makes tools for wafer grinding[1], which are not really any more complex than your typical computer-controlled metal cutting machine tools, yet they are quite profitable[2]. Just look at those headline margin figures!

It seems to be a matter of niche and competition.

[1]: https://www.disco.co.jp/eg/products/grinder/dfg8560.html

[2]: https://www.disco.co.jp/eg/ir/library/doc/film/20230420.pdf

>There no money in tools: The Dutch company ASML would like to talk to you.

"You made a general argument. Here's a single counter-example, on a very tiny niche, compared to thousands of examples in your favor, making much more money in other areas of IT".

I mean, you're using a computer to shitpost here. Everything in that computer, let alone the computer as a whole, is a tool that made its manufacturer and any vendors involved lots of money.

Yeah, I also wear clothes (kids go into garments/fashion), drink coffee (kids start coffee shops), and buy many other items besides. By this logic every market is a lucrative one, if people buy stuff from it. So, just go and build computers, companies make money selling them. Start the new Apple or Dell.

It's almost as if this missed the point of TFA entirely, and as if "things are sold in that field and there are some player making lots of money in it" is useless by itself for evaluating a field/niche regarding to its money making opportunities.

Let me introduce you to a wonderful concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

Not bad for shitposting eh?

Here's another multibillion dollar example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lam_Research

The article specifically reaches into the whole "spanners are too cheap to be worth making" space. The article didn't say "except of course, those gold plated NASA spanners" or "ok: so this is a broad brush but there are notable exceptions"

I called out an exception. I like the article. I think the point is well made. I would say it a bit differently: commodities are very hard to make profitably once the exemplar is good enough, and cheap enough. If you seek higher utility then don't be surprised if the people who use your Tool/Machine/Robot balk at the price, when their goal is met by the lower utility commodity.

If you don't care about lead and tolerance, those fake resistors are just fine for hobbyist use. If your project needs lead free and 0.001% then you really need to pay the premium for originals, not fakes.

And ASML is a niche, but an example of a generic problem in their line of reasoning. For almost any "industry" you care to mention from coathanger bending to lobster fishing, there is somebody making good profit selling what the coathanger-wrangler, or fisherman would call "a tool"

ie: cute argument, but actually... sorry.. niches are everywhere.

The broad brush market is alive and well, though.

If your tool is an integral part of a larger chain, as is the case for ASML's machines being in the chain of silicon chips, that's a different story than a tool which simply eases the process by a small factor.

UV lithography is the only way to make advanced chips required for various other tools and appliances, but an OS debugger (as the author puts it) is just a nicer printf.

There's big money in one, and small money in the other.

In software tools. Hardware tools are hardware.

There are lots of profitable software tool companies, aren't there? Atlassian, JetBrains, Microsoft, most of them are smaller than this but still "money"; I live in open-source land, but everyone else I know works somewhere that spends money on all kinds of tools.

It's just that the fruit in software tools doesn't hang so low, I think.

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