
Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software - shankarganesh
https://shankarganesh.blog/2020/03/31/business-software-is-so-good-now-that-its-competing-with-consumer-software/
======
hyko
_Can you think of another mainstream video calling software that’s as good as
Zoom, for consumers?_

FaceTime, circa 2010.

 _Styluses to capacitive touch. Taxis to Ubers. Torrents to Netflix. MP3s to
Spotify_

Since when were torrents, MP3s, and styluses anything to do with business
software?

The trend of business adoption of “consumer” tech had basically one standout
example, which was the shift from Microsoft to Apple products in mobile.
People wanted iPhones for themselves and their IT departments didn’t have a
clue how to handle that at first. You could maybe point to adoption of GPUs
for ML as another clear example of a current wave of consumer tech to business
adoption.

These trends ebb and flow over time. People have used business software for
personal reasons since forever. See: the abuse of spreadsheets over the past
40 years.

~~~
Macha
This confused me too at first, but I think it's being used as an example of
improvements in consumer software compared to prior consumer software that the
author feels business software would be unlikely to have done.

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zelphirkalt
Who ever mentions Zoom under such a headline and then cannot think of anything
better must have a pretty limIted experience with software and must have been
living under a rock lately. Don't remember Zoombombing? What about the fact,
that Zoom planned to limit encryption to only business customers?

~~~
jonnypotty
Also we discover that Facebook for business is good apparently (it isn't) and
also this is consumer software taking over the business world i.e completely
the opposite phenomenon. Also the writer believes choices like this to be
rational, instead of shitty managers with nothing to do trying things to
justify their paycheck and consumers acting like heard animals installing
anything that's free and is something everyone else is getting. I didn't
choose zoom for the UI, I had to install it cos I have to cos everyone is
using it because its free and not completly dreadful.

~~~
zelphirkalt
You are describing the well known "network effect".

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jagtesh
While I admit, the OP/author didn't choose the best examples and could have
researched more. And also, there are still plenty of crappy business apps out
there. (To the troll comments, neither Oracle nor SAP are modern by any
account. Oracle predates the internet).

I will also say that the OP is right about this trend. If I had to pick
between two equals, with equivalent SLAs/privacy/other business
considerations, I'd pick the tool that's easier to use and onboard. An easier
to use tool means my team spends less time struggling and more time being
productive and happy!

Think AWS vs GCP. AWS is older, clunkier with a terrible UX and GCP is modern
, aesthetically pleasing, gets out of your way and innovative (cloud console
FTW).

JIRA is from a time before this trend started, but ClickUp is a
JIRA/Confluence/Trello alternative that faster, modern and easier to use.

Notion is another great example. It's a business tool diguised in consumer
clothings. It's so well designed, easy to use and massively customizable that
it serves both use-cases equally well (at least for me).

While Dropbox started out as a consumer app, Box was business centric from the
get go and has a really good UX. Same goes for Quip, that's an alternative to
Google docs for business that was eventually acquired by Salesforce. It's UX
was way ahead of it's time.

And there's Shopify! It's a dream to use for setting up an online store,
compared to any of its predecessors.

So in spirit, the OP is right.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
> Notion is another great example. It's a business tool diguised in consumer
> clothings

I would say it's the opposite. Notion is a consumer app that's so customizable
that it's started to compete with business tools.

By your logic, Microsoft Word is a "business software" in this context. Also
you could say the same about iPhone, that it's a "business tool disguised as a
consumer device". They are not. It's the other way around. All these companies
target consumer market, but because they have designed them well and are
powerful, they can be used in business use cases.

------
cocktailpeanuts
How does he go from "Zoom is great" to "Business software is so good now, that
it's competing with consumer software"?

His only supporting example is Zoom. Then he goes on to generalize the shit
out of it which is not really that convincing.

Zoom succeeded in consumer space because of COVID, period. Good for them, but
I don't like people who spin stories. Even before covid I've known about Zoom
for a while as some nerdy videoconferencing software, but never saw it as a
high quality consumer app.

~~~
throwanem
I know a lot of folks who heavily use Trello to organize their personal lives.

He's wrong about Slack, though. That mindshare among people who don't already
use Slack at work, and even among many who do, belongs overwhelmingly to
Discord.

~~~
Macha
But Trello was designed as the opposite of prevailing business tools at that
time and part of that was that consumer use cases (e.g. college projects) were
mentioned often in earlier examples, so it's hard to claim it as an example of
a business tool migrating to consumer use.

Its taken a more business first approach since the atlassian acquisition for
sure, but that wasn't always the exclusive focus.

~~~
throwanem
It wasn't always the exclusive focus, but I think it was always the _primary_
focus. After all, it came out of Fog Creek Software (now Glitch); given their
product history, Trello would stand out as the only consumer-focused product
they'd ever released, had they actually released it as one.

As I recall the original marketing (imperfectly, I'm sure, as it's been quite
a while ago now), the pitch was focused around the concept of a project
management tool without the usual overheads and complexities such tools tend
to bring along, something you could just jump into and start using. "And you
can even use it for stuff outside of work!" might've been there also, I don't
doubt it, but I have to think it would've been secondary at best.

~~~
Macha
I agree, I'm not saying it's a 50/50 split. But I think consumers were at
least considered in the design process for Trello, which is the not the case
for Zoom.

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jitl
The strategy talked about here is called “land and expand” - get some users
hooked for personal or hobby use-cases with free trial, and they’ll want to
bring your product in to work. Get a single small team in a business, and
they’ll become your best salespeople to their peers and managers. If your user
experience is good enough, your product will sell itself virally within an
organization. Slack did a great job of this.

------
JohnStrangeII
In my experience the best software is the one that no longer distinguishes
between the markets. For example, I've just found the Serif Affinity graphics
software suite. Each of their programs can be used as substitute for ten times
more expensive Adobe software and is good enough for professionals (with
caveats and limitations, I suppose) but at the same time is affordable enough
for non-professional consumers.

Recently, almost the whole pro audio market has shifted in a similar way. They
realized that they can make more money by targeting hobbyists and musicians
instead of studio owners, so now most companies offer 70% to 90% sales from
time to time. Others have started to launch software at a tenth of the price
that used to be normal - $30 instead of $300.

I prefer that to the "free plus pro" version model. But I admit that I have no
clue about marketing and sales and don't know the downsides of aiming at
consumer and professionals at the same time.

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uniqueid
Consumer software is so bad now, that business software is competing with it.

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kasperni
I just installed Oracle DB to help my mum with managing her recipes. It's
really improved her TTT (Time to table).

~~~
skummetmaelk
No child was ever disowned for choosing Oracle!

~~~
Scarblac
Telling my children now that they would become the first, if they did this. In
our house we use PostgreSQL.

------
LockAndLol
Obviously this person hasn't tried Jitsi. The whole article reads like an ad
for Zoom.

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AnonsLadder
I'm surprised the author and no one has mentioned Telegram Messenger, they are
very huge. The simple appearance of it makes it perfect for personal &
professional use, it looks more inviting than Discord and Slack, imo.

~~~
shankarganesh
I know a lot of businesses (non-tech) in India who use WhatsApp groups for
talking to their teams. But it's the other way round - consumer software
getting adopted by teams isn't it?

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vijaybritto
I found it odd that he doesn't mention Stripe which is excellent in B2B. Its
true that we are using Zoom extensively and it works well. But that's just one
software. Almost all of my work apps suck apart from Zoom. Especially the
HR/Salary portals are terrible to use in almost all companies I have worked so
far. Ex: ZingHR loads for more than 10seconds to show anything useful. The UI
looks like it was made with a default styling from one of the many frameworks
available online.

------
bonyt
> At one point, business software had no choice but to stop being clunky and
> terrible to use, because nobody wanted to walk into work to use shitty
> software.

There’s still a lot of clunk out there in some industries. Maybe it’s just
legacy software and an unwillingness to change, but my life as a lawyer at a
large law firm involves a lot of clunky software and a poor laptop with its
fans permanently spinning from it.

------
pragmaticpirate
Nice article. I'd love to see examples of people using slack for personal
life. Don't know anyone who does this.

~~~
zelphirkalt
Slack is not a good example for this headline. Loads of chat applications are
much better than Slack. Slack sucks. Slack is chosen by business people, who
heard about it from their business friends and ignore input from their tech
team.

Examples:

Discord - but terrible data policy as well, but at least works fluently
without long load times and they managed to use webrtc in 2020, which Slack
still sucjs at and gives you BS about using Firefox and limits It for the free
account. Ridiculous.

Zulip Chat - Much better chat functionality and conversation model. Can be
self hosted.

Anything with a proper Markdown parser, not something that sucks as much as
whatever Slack is using. Oh well, but it could be worse _looks at Atlassian
Confluence_.

Anything that does not heat up 4 Cores at 100% at startup for an inapproprIate
amount of time.

Anything respecting your privacy.

~~~
antb123
Keybase (now zoom)? Matrix(getting better all the time)?

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soulchild37
Lol have you ever used Quickbooks, and have to integrate their API to your
server? It’s clusterfuck and their server down like once a week.

I work for a enterprise (yes boring write code to generate pdf report from
database etc), integration with business software API always gave us headache.

~~~
shankarganesh
I mean it's getting a lot better isn't it? I'm sure there's someone already
building a QuickBooks which you don't have to struggle with so much, to use.

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return1
Zoom is not business software. Even slack barely is. Both have free version
for the masses which is crucial to their success. A fair comparison would be
with something that does not have free tier.

~~~
ZephyrBlu
It's bottom-up business software. Apparently this is a common approach in B2B
these days. Figma is another example of bottom-up B2B software.

------
RachelF
The author has never had a look at any of Atlassian's business software.

Atlassian has grown large by producing business software that can be described
as "low quality" at best!

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aronpye
Yeah, only listing one example, I.e. Zoom, especially when that example has
numerous faults such as poor privacy, kind of nullifies whatever point the
article was trying to make.

