
Every Company Is Becoming Software - vsyu
https://www.confluent.io/blog/every-company-is-becoming-software
======
ken
It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous
article. Then by 1/3 of the way through, it's full on "Apache Kafka® and its
uses".

I feel cheated. I was ready to defend the non-software companies of the world,
but the article has very little to do with the title. It seems like just an
ad.

~~~
arthurcolle
Agreed. There should be law that forces all advertising to be within a
dedicated HTML tag called <marketing> so that anyone can just opt in to a
plugin that deletes all marketing tags.

Would that clean up the Web or what!

~~~
rolltiide
But then ad companies wouldn't be software anymore!

~~~
arthurcolle
Win-win!

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mfer
> That is, the core processes a business executes—from how it produces a
> product, to how it interacts with customers, to how it delivers services—are
> increasingly specified, monitored, and executed in software.

When I think of businesses I think of the local auto repair shop, the
restaurant around the corner, the paving company working on the roads, the
local HVAC company around the corner from me, and the local gyms.

The core products at the boot camp workout place across the street from me
don't need to be specified, monitored, or executed in software.

Somehow this reminded me that empathy is decreasing in society (you can search
on it). Putting more computers between businesses and people isn't necessarily
going to be better for people or the way we interact with each other.

~~~
libertine
The sad thing, or at minimum odd thing, is that we're few years away from the
positive differentiation factor being "you'll be talking to a human".

In fact it should be made illegal to have people who's livelihood depend on a
platform to be left at the hands of shit auto replies. If large scale comes at
the cost of injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing.

Youtube, Amazon Seller Central, and many others are terrible examples of what
future holds for a lot of people.

~~~
nostrademons
That's already the case in many industries - for many SaaS and telecom
businesses the differentiator for expensive B2B plans is "24/7 support with a
real human being", big IT companies like IBM and Oracle rely on "There's a
human to blame when things go wrong" as their sole value prop, high-end retail
like Nordstroms differentiates themselves from low-end retail like Walmart by
the availability of personal sales assistants, and waiter-service restaurants
differentiate themselves from McDonald's by the existence of a human who takes
your order. The difference between Uber and a car service is whether the
driver's waiting for you at baggage claim, greets you politely, and makes
small talk on your way home.

Personally I like it - I usually pick the self-checkouts, kiosks, and apps
over talking with a real human being, who frequently acts like a robot anyway
and tends to be slower and make mistakes more often.

Also, I wonder if folks who say "if large scale comes at the cost of
injustice, maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing" have really thought through
the implications of this. I remember talking to a classmate in high school
about Native American tribes, industrialization, American history, and how we
really fucked over this idea of a tribe or village or community and the world
was a lot less richer because of it. (This was pre-Internet - if only we
could've guessed what the next 25 years would bring.) I agreed with all of his
points, but then pointed out that the carrying capacity of the earth before
modern agriculture, modern medicine, fossil fuels, etc. was roughly 1/20th
what it is today, and did he really want to kill 95% of the people alive
today? He responded, "Man, I feel shitty now." That's the nature of the scale
vs. justice dilemma: you can't critically analyze scale & progress without
also acknowledging the huge injustices it's created, but at the same time,
reversing scale literally means death & suffering.

~~~
libertine
> I wonder if folks who say "if large scale comes at the cost of injustice,
> maybe large scale shouldn't be a thing" have really thought through the
> implications of this.

I'm saying companies should be accountable for the loss they cause - if you're
a Amazon Seller and you get your listing removed, you get an auto-reply and
you try to talk to a human just to find a stream of auto-replies pasted
together, because is in the sake of scale and progress the it's ok?

Same goes for copyright claims on Youtube. You end up talking to auto-replies.

Why should people livelihood be the cost to pay for scale? Why can't Google or
Amazon pay people to supervise these replies and make amendments when the help
is not only requested but required?

I don't buy that "cost of progress" argument. I'm pro progress, I'm just
against half baked solutions that seem to be progress but end up being cost
saving measures.

Why can't a user who got wrongfully harmed be compensated? Is that against
scaling? Or shouldn't that be a cost of scale?

Currently in my opinion it's irresponsibility. Irresponsibility disguised as
Policy & Terms Agreements.

At least in the EU Amazon is being pressured to cut this bullshit and act
properly.

------
sov
Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or
buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
Content Manager at Confluent:
[https://github.com/vsyu](https://github.com/vsyu),
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriayu/)

------
Mathnerd314
They say software but then the article is about databases, event streams, and
networked communication.

But they leave out the other big part of running a company, which is getting
the low-paid worker drones to show up on time and make the company money.

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haolez
While I mostly agree with Jay Kreps, I believe that the upfront costs of event
sourcing systems are way higher than traditional ones.

Kafka itself seems to have minimum hardware requirements way above something
like a single-node Mongo or Postgres installation, let alone the
infrastructure to create projections.

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mavdi
Cringy mental gymnastics of turning "Why Software is Eating the World" into
"pay Confluent for something you get for free".

~~~
opportune
Yeah, I actually flagged the post originally because it is so spammy and a
dumb ad.

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nighthawk24
2020 Every Company Is Becoming Software

2030 Every Company Is Becoming Smart Contract

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geodel
I am tempted to add "Every Software is becoming crappy". There will of course
be exceptions but I feel general trend seems true.

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jones1618
True for a lot of industries. Unfortunately, there are two corporate responses
to this: 1) Software is a strategic competitive advantage and market
differentiator and 2) Software is a cheap commodity that can be outsourced and
cobbled together from lowest-bidder parts.

Not only do both attitudes exist at different companies but, in my experience,
a single company can flip between "software is our secret sauce!" to "let's
focus on our core strengths and outsource the rest!" in a heartbeat depending
on what the venture capitalists say that week.

Using some SAAS is often smart and useful but if you're outsourcing your core
business processes and new development for the sake of short-term efficiency,
you're handing the keys of innovation for your company over to somebody else.

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proc0
This will be useful for future AI "employees".

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sergiotapia
I'm two paragraphs in, it feel like this dude wants to sell me something.
Edit: Yeah it was a pitch, sneaky sneaky ;)

~~~
ttul
The HackerNews crowd will not be taken in by this copy; however, it will
doubtless work on enterprise folks.

