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Ask HN: What's the greatest piece of non-dogfooded software?

9 points by nathancspencer ↗ HN
It seems like every "great" piece of software, e.g. the operating systems of Apple and Microsoft, the search engine of Google, AWS inside Amazon, Facebook etc was dogfooded.

What's the biggest exception to this rule?

9 comments

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defrost
The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (DDSACCS), which sends emergency action messages to nuclear forces.

Not entirely software .. but an example of a system not used in house .. or at all ... yet.

Greatest? Hmm. Hard to say.

muzani
Nuclear deterrence means that a nation can counter while/after being nuked, and it has to demonstrate this capacity confidently enough to deter any country that would nuke them.

It would be an amazing system. Cut the head off and up to 20% of the world is dead or injured, followed by the socioeconomic collapse due to destruction at this scale.

d--b
Well software for non-software people...

Like I doubt that people writing autoCAD are ones who needed it in the first place.

Maybe I am wrong.

mattbrewsbytes
Do companies like Oracle and SAP run their own business on their ERP platforms? That might be the biggest one.
thorin
I'm pretty sure they do, but quite a few parts of the Oracle applications suite are acquired so probably not those. I'm sure sap would use sap erp, from what I've seen almost all big European companies use sap for payroll.
aristofun
How is facebook dogfooded? Do they buy facebook ads?

And wasn’t windows originally created as a product for sale? I don’t remember microsoft starting as hardware company. Maybe that is why windows sucks :)

LarryMade2
I think there are probably some out there, likely would have started out as a niche contract job (like say fast food POS systems) and have built up from there. Though its really hard to make something like that "great" unless you hire experts from that field to help develop them.
yamatokaneko
The first company that came to mind is Unity. Epic has Unreal and actively dogfoods it by developing Fortnite. But Unity doesn’t really have a flagship product like that, right? I'm sure they use it internally to build sample games, but nothing at AAA scale?