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Ask HN: What work software do you use, where’s there no good options?

14 points by tiffanyh ↗ HN
I’ll admit it, I’m looking for business ideas.

What software do you use for work (not consumer software), that doesnt have any good options for the category it’s trying to solve?

10 comments

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walolla
Hi, I personally don't have a lot of experience regarding this topic, but I've had some observations and heard opinions on this topic from other people.

From my understanding, the more "serious" the industry is, the less cool new alternatives will be there. As an example, software for cashiers in a lot of countries is still running on windows 95, just because it was once developed and then, nobody bothered to update it, think of new features, etc. Public transportation systems, especially ticketing, if the country/city won't invest in upgrading, it won't happen. You can also think about more hardcore industries (chemistry, machinery, etc.).

But it's incredibly hard to get into these things, "don't fix what's not broken" is a pretty good reason for rejecting new ideas, but of course it all depends on your location, ability, expertise and all these good things.

I'm sorry for a very broad response, hopefully it can give you some thoughts, sorry if not.

walolla
Come to think about it, my friend was thinking about doing something for some city in Czech Republic regarding public transportation. From what I heard, it's doable, if you have enough proof, that you will actually solve a specific problem, something like, upgrading the payment system, so people don't have to buy tickets and could use their phone instead, making an app for tracking busses with accurate waiting times, stuff like that.
bruce511
The problem with this sort of software is two-fold.

First, if the target customer is public money (ie govt at dome level) then you run into procurement layers. Unlike business govt can't just have sn opionion on the best solution and buy that. Specs have to be written, tenders awarded, qualifications checked. It's far from a simple process.

The second hurdle is that, it's immediate scale. It's an all or nothing solution. All the bits need to work flawlessly, at significant scale, with custom hardware, in various locations (or worse, in this case, moving vehicles. ) All with unreliable connectivity.

It's a large, complex system with a million edge cases. The programming part is easy, it's the rest of everything that kills you.

Yes, projects like this are possible. But they are wicked expensive to pull off, and require an exhaustive specification, and a very long buying process.

walolla
Yeah, that's for sure, I guess you just have to look for the right institution, maybe make some friends. But overall, brace yourself for a long and rough process.
kingkongjaffa
At a manufacturing company I once worked at they had and old windows 98 plugged into an old label printer, and the software wouldn’t work on newer machines so they just had that computer turned on 24/7 ready to print labels.
moooo99
This is super common. There are still many Windows95/98/XP machines in use in manufacturing environments. The control software often hasn’t been upgraded in ages and the company that made the equipment often doesn‘t exist anymore. But what are you gonna do? Throw away a 10M€ piece of equipment because you’re not getting windows updates anymore?
parentheses
You should work at some companies. You'll find places where gaps exist and have concrete ideas and an understanding of your customer.
walolla
Great point! And if you see, that there are already working competitors, don't give up, it probably means, that these products already have market fit, so your idea can potentially work. Of course, you need to perform at least some market analysis to know how are things looking (size of the market, existing problems, willingness of customers to adapt, etc.)
deterministic
The hard part is not writing the software. The hard part is convincing companies that it is worth the switch cost to change the software they use.

Which means making it possible for customers to automatically transfer all the data they have already created with the old software to the new software with zero loss.

It also means convincing the customer that the cost of learning the new software is worth it.

And it means convincing the customer that having to deal with your brand new set of bugs, instead of the old set of bugs they have already learned how to work around or fix, is worth it.

In other words, you need world class sales skills way more than you need developer skills.

treetalker
There’s a gaping hole in my industry and I’ve been planning out an app with all the missing features. But I’ve never coded anything big/serious before, only little scripts and automations and stuff like that. If you want to pair up and see if we can put something together, let me know how I can DM you.