

Ask HN: What do you hate using but are forced to use? - anonbonjovi

I'd like to discover niches where people are stuck using software or services that they hate, but where there aren't viable alternatives.<p>What are you forced to use but absolutely hate using? If there are viable alternatives, what barriers are there to switching?<p>I'm less interested in hearing generic "I hate Microsoft, but have to use it for work" statements.<p>I'm more interested in hearing "I work in [industry] and have to use [bad software]. It sucks because [reasons]. We haven't switched to [alternative] because of [more reasons]."
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SwellJoe
So, I wonder if you're thinking of starting a business based on one of these
"I hate using" stories. If you are, I'd advise caution entering a market you
don't actually understand personally. Yes, we all make software that
eventually grows to do things we don't use ourselves (I use functionality that
touches less than 10% of our total codebase on a daily basis, and never hit
more than 20% of it, for example), but without understanding the core problem
set of your target audience, I'm not sure you can build effective software to
solve those problems.

When I worked in scientific computing, one of the founders of the company I
worked for had done doctoral work in the areas the software was covering, and
the company hired domain experts, who also happened to know a bit about
software development, whenever they moved into new fields.

This is the reason I've never gone into medical billing, despite the fact that
I _know_ the medical billing software industry is a mess, and also an
incredibly lucrative market. I know it is a mess, because my sister owns a
medical billing firm, and I've seen the software her company uses. But,
without spending a few months working in the field, I wouldn't be effective at
solving those problems. If I ever did decide to start a company in that field,
I think I'd need to spend some time in the trenches of that particular field.

Likewise, I suspect if you do find yourself a lucrative and currently poorly
served market niche to focus on, you will need to also find a few companies to
work closely with, so you actually understand the problems and how they can be
solved. Also, keep in mind that the harder existing software is to use, the
more training existing users will have had to know how to use it. Don't
underestimate how hard it is to convert someone from using "complicated but
familiar" solutions to using "easy but new" solutions.

Not seeking to rain on the "I hate X" parade, just pointing out that if you
aren't scratching your own itch, to some degree, you have a lot of work to do
just to begin to understand the problem domain.

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abalashov
Thank you, very good post. Echoes my own thoughts.

It is a response that I have frequently entertained in my mind to
entrepreneurial cheerleaders (and even sometimes PG's statements, insofar as
they relate to solving truly niche commercial software problems, although I
don't think he intentionally suggests that you can do it without the
experience by any means).

But yes, I'm in telecom and I see outside consultants and vendors who are
basically general IT in their orientation show up all the time and think that
they can create better OSS/BSS (operational support/billing support systems)
solutions, switch provisioning and monitoring software, and workflow/process
management in the highly bureaucratised and rather regulated carrier space
(i.e. Local Number Portability).

Then I see them get fired a few months later because they just haven't the
foggiest earthly clue what minefield they stepped into. They would have
benefitted from hiring at least one omnicurious person who has actually worked
for a competitive carrier first.

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jacquesm
Linux. It's arguably one of the best unix clones ever and it is extremely
stable. Still, I feel that another clone of macro kernel unix was a missed
opportunity. Plan 9 and it's ilk (and QnX) seem much more the direction to go
in for many reasons, most of them having to do with modularization, upgrading
your operating system (even the kernel) without rebooting and user land device
drivers.

Still, to make a living plan 9 and QnX are niches, plan 9 is very much an
experimental os, and QnX is mostly relegated to being a real-time embedded
systems os. If you've worked with either one of them for any length of time
though you really will begin to appreciate that there are other possibilities
that are worth researching.

Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum had this out a long time ago, and it seems that
Linux 'won' by acclamation but I'm not so sure that wasn't simply
pigheadedness instead of sound engineering reasons.

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bayareaguy
Some of my clients use Windows Server 2008 on remote colocated blade servers.
It sucks because it's difficult to manage, it constantly raises useless
authorization dialogs and it's terribly inefficient at even the simplest
operations like copying files. To make things worse many operations have to be
done using DRAC controllers and a broken IE interface over a slow network.
Linux is a viable alternative and some are moving to it slowly but in many
cases historic developers and programs are tied to Windows.

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olihb
I work in market research and have to use SPSS. It sucks because the old
versions would crash for no good reason and the new versions are slow. The
output is ugly as hell. I haven't switched to R, StatXP, Stata because I'm
lazy, we have a huge number of old surveys in SPSS format and a whole lot of
scripts and macro written.

Oh and the copy protection sucks. Seriously, if I want to pirate your
software, I will download a crack.

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dmix
My mouse. I would love to control OSX entirely by keyboard. I tried the
framing systems on linux but it just wasn't for me.

~~~
thunk
Word. That itch inspired my current Big Scratch.

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paulbaumgart
Xilinx ISE. Admittedly I only used it for a college course ~1.5 years ago, and
then only whatever version they made freely downloadable, but it was
ridiculously buggy and user-unfriendly compared to any other development tool
I've tried.

