

Ask HN: is there any demand for old software maintenance/renewal? - danx

We are the team of skilled programmers from offshore (Russia) and would like to start a business to maintain&#x2F;sustain the old software that U.S. companies possibly have to date. Our proposal is to get full ownership of this software (NDA is a must), including creating new maintenance releases, patches, fixing existing bugs, and making the old software run on the newer OSes like Win 8.
How do you feel if there is a demand in such a service? Will you consider to outsource your maintenance tasks for the old software to us to allow your team to focus on newest and greatest tech?
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mjn
I think the answer could be yes, but the question as stated is a bit too
general. Do you have in mind specific software, or at least a specific kind of
software? I think it might work best in a specific niche, as you could become
known as a go-to point for updated versions of software in that area.

One possible way of picking software would be to try to find cases where
companies are running old OSs solely to keep some legacy software operating. I
know this is relatively common with some laboratory equipment, for example,
where some labs are running old Win9x boxes for data collection, because the
data-collection software and drivers for discontinued equipment haven't been
released in a newer version.

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RKoutnik
While this is a noble idea, I don't think it will fly. Learning a large legacy
system is a grueling experience. It'll be difficult for your team to adapt.
Plus, it'll be difficult to communicate with the users who might not
understand just how hard your work is. Finally, most American companies are
very possessive about what they've made and won't want to give it up to an
out-of-country team, NDA or not.

This may yet be viable. If I were you, my next step would be to read pg's
essay on schlep blindness.

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danx
I'm not expecting it to fly either. I would be happy to be on the last page of
Inc's top 5000 companies, as this looks hard but feasible.

I was working for a large outsourcing company for 14 years so I'm pretty aware
of this type of work and I'm comfortable with it. We used to maintain and old
system which was born in '75\. But that was a huge company of 1,000 employees
and the magnitude of customers and the influence that this company have is not
achievable by us now, as we are rather small independent team of professinals
entering an U.S. market for the first time. I admit that the tier one
companies are not our target at this time; we are too small for them to handle
their huge legacy codebase.

I foresee there might be some demand from the small software companies which
are at least 15 years on the market, so they have their legacy products which
may still be there in the field, but I'm not sure how big is the demand and if
they really open to work with us as an offshore dev team.

How can we become trustworthy for these potential clients? My ideas are: \- to
incorporate in the U.S. \- to hire a sales rep in the U.S. \- to get an U.S.
bank account to facilitate easier B2B payments

Any other ideas are welcome. From where to start? I really need to evaluate
the capacity of this market and the opportunities it may give to a small tech
team.

