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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

My utterly cynical take is that the way to win with software is to put as much money and effort into marketing and sales as possible and as little as possible into the actual product. Especially B2B seems to do this a lot in practice because that software is bought based on checklist items and demos by salespeople.

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You're starting to realize why eng is a cost center.

The goal of the business it to make money, not make a great product.

They will make the product better if and only if it will lead to greater profits.

If you can make more money hiring more sales and marketing people to sell a broken product than hiring more engineers to fix the product, you're going to hire more sales and marketing people.

I...can't fault this, as much as I hate it. This explains so much.

More broadly: products are the way to make profits, but they aren't the purpose of the venture.

So don’t work at a company that sells a software product to other businesses. Work at a company that has a business of its own, which runs more efficiently when the software is better.

You're still in a cost center.

That's an observation opposite to mine. Having worked at several B2B and several B2C companies, I've found that the latter products were better and more interesting because they served an actual need. Sure, the B2C apps may have had better UX and design and maybe even more flashy tech, but they were frequently engaging in dark patterns and generally not that concerned about whether the users were actually benefiting (e.g. a language learning app with no research into how well users learn, but a big marketing budget and all sorts of conversion and retention metrics).

I don't think this is a cynical take. I think it is the rational take. Anyone not doing this is going to be outcompeted by those who are.

I also like that we try to build 'ratings' sites that end up being coopted as yet another ad sales vector.

Larry Ellison has that cynical take too, and it made him rich.

It's a balancing act. You may or may not agree that Oracle products are a good value but they generally have some good engineering behind them. Oracle also puts a ton of money into sales and marketing.

I think it's been true for some time that Oracle Database has largely been in maintenance mode, with relatively little new engineering or refactoring being done and more resources devoted to sales, marketing, and of course license compliance enforcement. "More lawyers on staff than engineers", as the anecdote goes.

"Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison."

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