Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

A bunch of years ago, at college, I built a class management platform for my university. It won me $1k (which was an insane amount of money to college me), and I met with president of the univeristy to pitch him on using it. They were potentially buying Oracle software, and I found myself up against them. At the time, I felt like this professor.

They obviously went with Oracle. I'm sure they spent a ton of money, and I'm sure it was the right choice. I would have gotten bored of it pretty quick. You don't pay Oracle because it's a good deal or a good product... you pay Oracle so you never have to think about it ever again.

I don't really have a point here. I wish there were better options in the market. But I certainly don't want to build them, since it's a boring problem with bad customers (edtech is a horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price point that makes it worth it to them, and they have customers willing to pay it.

Hopefully someone sees this blog, and rather than be annoyed at academic/government waste, sees a big market they can dominate with a better product. But given how it was written in 2013, I'm not so sure.

They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M without thinking.

CUNY's yearly budget is $5.7 billion, and they serve 243,000 students. It makes up 0.088% of their budget.

That $5M/year works out to $20/student/year, so in perspective it's a very small amount of money.

(Source: https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy24/ex/agencies/appr...)

The one-letter omission of "k" in "$20k/student/year" really makes a difference here.

No, $5M / 250,000 is $20. (I updated my comment to add a clause about $5M, to reduce confusion.)

> so in perspective it's a very small amount of money

$5M/year could pay for at least another 10-20 professors which is like an entirely new department. Let's also not forget the initial $600M spent which (assuming they'll use this software for the next 30 years) will be $20M/year bringing the total to $100/student/year which isn't negligible.

More broadly speaking, I have a gripe with people bringing up percentages of budgets when discussing how much value something brings. My college had a startup fair where students pitched some super innovative ideas. The grand prize was $5000. If we had $5M, we could give that grand prize to 1000 teams and imagine how much more valuable that would be for the school compared to another feature bloated, overpriced piece of software.

Okay, so if you hire 10-20 more professors... who's going to build and maintain the system so students can sign up for those classes?

Programmers. You code the system once, it's not that complex, spend $10M max.

Then you maintain it with a couple of senior devs at $1M/year max.

> edtech is a horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price point that makes it worth it to them, and they have customers willing to pay it.

The way businesses deal with this is by selling more expensive software! That's why Oracle is getting rich by selling crappy software to difficult sectors that nobody wants to touch.

Well sure if you can manifest money like a daydream, then you won't have to think about it anymore. I don't know though, maybe there are some folks out there who do in fact spend time thinking about unnecessary costs?

Yes, as an individual you do. But you're not a network of universities with 250,000 students a year that NEEDS the system to work.

(Also, most people don't agree they're paying Oracle $600M for this... there's no source, and it's likely significantly less.)

My understanding is that this network of universities is in fact a bunch of individuals who sometimes care about costs they are generating for their customers.

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