

Ask YC: When did we stop wanting useful software? - chriszf

Why is it that all webapps have to be 'fun' or 'social' applications these days? I wrote some software (as a webapp) that I think is pretty useful, but has only the barest and most rudimentary social networking features. I showed it to a co-worker whose first response was "cool". His second response, a few days later was, "I'm going to build a copy of your program, only I'm going to make it focus on the social and sharing aspect. I hope you don't mind."<p>Now, on one hand, I'm not really offended, since my app is just a clone of an existing (but unavailable to me) app. On the other hand, I'm pretty offended that to this guy, software isn't good unless you can socialize through it. I'll admit that there is a natural social aspect that comes out of the idea, but whatever happened to solitary software that just helps you be productive and organized? Why the heck isn't there a simple web-based address book out there? That said, I applaud mint.com and their decidedly non-social approach to webapps.
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mixmax
Don't believe the hype.

Right now everyone is talking about facebook, social software, and what have
you. But most of these sites aren't making any money, and they never will.
It's basically a really crowded market with no clear income model unless
you're really big.

Find a niche that hasn't been exploited and create software that solves a
problem in that niche. B2B is probably the best place to look - if you can
come up with a piece of siftware that can either save a company money or make
them money they will be happy to pay.

If you have ever seen SAP's implementations of ERP systems you will know that
the B2B software out there is totally crap, and that it should be possible to
come up with something better. And there are real companies willing to pay
real money for your software.

There are plenty of people and companies and people that want and will pay for
useful software, you just don't read about them on digg or reddit because they
aren't sexy and cool.

~~~
trekker7
Any advice for how to learn about these markets, for the 20 somethings out
there that can't immediately relate to this stuff?

~~~
bsaunder
Pick a big company in this market (perhaps SAP) and start learning everything
you can about them. Read their marketing pages and try to understand what they
are selling and to whom. What problem do they think their customers have that
they are solving? Look for companies hiring people with those skills (i.e.
that require SAP experience) and see what they are building (systems like SAP
seem to produce value for the internals of a company and it's hard to see what
this is from the outside).

Unfortunately the techno-babble on these enterprise systems sounds pseudo
intelligent. To see through all the buzz words and fads you need to work with
these systems for a while. But to do that you almost have to drink the Kool
Aid. The trick is to stop drinking once you can see the better solution. For
many people here, I suspect the hardest part is swallowing the Kool Aid (at
least that's the hard part for me).

But then as you go to build your better system, you need to realize that you
are going to try to sell this to people who have been consuming this stuff for
a very long time. They _need_ SCA, BPM, SOA, UML, and just about every other
combination of three letter characters. They don't know any other way. It's
unfathomable to them that there could be an easier, simpler solution to their
woes. It's like trying to describe a 3D world to a denizen of 2D space.

Any how just my 2 cents.

UPDATE:

May I recommend for your first glass of KoolAid:
<http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247234.html?Open>

(not that this is good or authoritative, more so a random sample of what's
ahead of you).

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noodle
we didn't.

the issue is that "we" has been moving, fairly quickly, from the techies or
business workers that used to primarily use the internet to, basically,
everyone from soccer moms to preteens/teens to grandmas.

grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to
keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such. teenagers
mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social.

there's still tons of people out there that need useful software, and useful
software is a great cash cow. now that population, that niche that needs your
software, while still probably sizable, no longer makes up a measurable
segment of the internet.

i'm building an app that will be marketed to a group of maybe 50k-100k people.
thats a negligible percentage of the internet-users at-large, but its still
way more than enough to (hopefully someday) make me a nice income stream.

edited to add: social aspects of apps are how applications have been moving to
monetize themselves while maintaining free-to-use cost. people need to return
and view ads frequently for bills to be paid, if the users aren't dishing out
the money themselves.

~~~
Agathos
"grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to
keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such"

What, Grandma thinks disk crashes can't happen to her? Grandma's wrong.

~~~
nostrademons
That's what DropBox is for. ;-)

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petercooper
Why is it that all books have to be 'cookbooks' or 'romantic novels' these
days? Why is it that all TV shows have to be 'reality shows' or 'talent
competitions' these days?

They're not. It's just that's what happens to be taking the #1 and #2 spots in
each field and getting most of the mindshare. There's still lots of room down
the tail; just less people are talking about it (this is what makes it rich,
fertile ground to mine.. 90% of the people are only chasing 10% of the pie!).

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rickmb
Maybe you should reverse the question. Why has software development always
been about productivity? What is it that makes people really happy, being
productive or having a rich social life? (Depending on your needs 'rich' may
be just that one special person, but still.)

It's funny you use 'a simple web-based address book' as an example, since an
address book is kind of a useless tool if it didn't have a purpose: social
contacts. In a world where 'everyone' is 'connected' it's only natural to
start looking beyond that and look for way of directly connecting the
addresses to the actual social contact.

Games aside, we are only now starting to look beyond the mere useful and
productive when it comes to software, it's a new and exciting field, with lots
yet to be discovered. And as an added bonus it's actually already proving to
be useful too.

Maybe the 'social' is being overemphasized right now, but that's only natural.
For a lot of software uses there is no real hard separation between the useful
and the social, it just wasn't possible to make that direct connection until
now.

No offence, but I kind of agree with 'that guy', if the software has a natural
social aspect, it isn't really complete without it. It's like a webshop that
doesn't allow you to order stuff, just make a printout and take it to the
store.

~~~
chriszf
No offense taken, you make a fair point.

However, the reason everything has been about productivity is because that is
the nature of computers, to automate tasks that would be tedious otherwise.
This fact hasn't changed, but it seems like no one's addressing the simpler
needs before tackling some crazy "It's like facebook, but with movies"
startup.

For my address book example, there are always practical matters to consider.
Privacy makes the 'social address book' a very tricky proposition. However,
the 'address book with a nice interface' just hasn't really been nailed down
(to my satisfaction, anyway). It would be hard to argue that such a thing
isn't useful or desirable.

Just so there's no pussyfooting here, I'll clarify what my software does, so
you can decide whether or not a social aspect is really necessary. It's a web
tool that clones the functionality of 'Delicious Library'. It's basically
personal inventory software for your media (games, books, movies, etc) and
keeping track of who you loan your stuff to. While the capability to browse
the libraries of your friends is a given, generalizing that to things like,
'see who else reads the same books' or 'form communities around specific
authors' seems a bit of a stretch. Not that they're bad ideas (I wish I had
the time to make them happen), but they're really a separate application.

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randomhack
Well everything "social" certainly has a very large mindshare and buzzshare
nowadays. This is due to very nature of social apps and also due to the fact
"social" apps are relatively new. The buzz of social apps is also much greater
in the developer community since the basic ideas are something that everyone
understands. Not every developer will be able to talk about hospital software
for example but every Joe can talk about "chat widgets".

But it certainly does not have an equivalent revenue share. Put the PROJECTED
revenue in 2009 of all "social" apps/platforms together and still you would
still be at far less than $10bn.

You certainly can make a lot of money by building useful non-social software.
It just wont be as visible or talked about.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_You certainly can make a lot of money by building useful non-social software.
It just wont be as visible or talked about._

Precisely. The original submitter's friend is thinking one of two things,
alone or in combination:

1\. "If I take this useful app and add some social networking, it will help to
market itself, which means it will sell more copies faster. Maybe it will even
go viral and I can quit my day job!"

2\. "Given the choice between building an app that is useful but obscure and
being visible and talked about, I'd rather be notorious."

Point 1 is sometimes right, but often wrong. There are lots of tools that
require a more traditional style of sales and marketing... and that have no
use for tacked-on social networking features.

Point 2, while not exactly wrong, is a different objective than simply making
money or improving people's lives.

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hooande
Most apps labeled "social" these days should probably be labeled as
"consumer", meaning they are intended to do "business" directly with the
public.

Consumer websites have one of the lowest barriers to entry in the history of
business. You don't have to know anyone, don't have to get a permit, don't
have to do anything at all besides make your website and put it online. That's
why they are popular to start and stories about them generate so much hype.

Consider this from another perspective for a moment, possibly your friend's
perspective. Someone you know made something that you think is really cool and
useful, but it probably isn't going to go anywhere. Trying to sell the "B2B"
route requires connections, years of industry experience and nice suits. Odds
are that neither of you have any of those things (or else I'd assume you'd be
using them)

But what you can do is build a consumer app and hope the "social" side gains
popularity. The very small chance of it becoming "the next facebook" (or
insert ridiculously lofty goal inspired by dhh here) is probably about equal
to the odds you'll be able to develop the B2B connections you need to do a
good job of selling the product. Business relationships and reputation
generally take years to develop and B2B customers are very demanding. It's
theoretically possible (but unlikely) that a consumer app will be an
"overnight sensation". That almost never, ever happens with B2B apps.

Lastly, we all want useful software. We just tend to talk about consumer
software here on hackernews because that's the game we've chosen to play. I'm
sure there are far, far less interesting sites out there devoted to B2B
software hacking if you look for them.

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run4yourlives
You just aren't reading enough 37Signals, obviously.

No seriously, you're just seeing the hype from SV, which is the same hype that
existed 10 years ago, and built basically on the same foundation of sand.
There are people out there building useful software, they just don't get the
attention they deserve because the niches they fill aren't new, splashy, or
"the next wave".

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lux
Socializing is both something human beings feel a need to do (therefore useful
in itself to satisfy that need) but it can also augment other activities to
make them more useful too. The latter requires care not to do "social for the
sake of being social in context Y" type stuff though. It has to make sense to
facilitate the original goal of the app.

Twitter seems to take some people a lot longer than others to "get" (myself
included). But I think that's because we're thinking of it in terms of the
latter scenario, i.e. what is its use besides socializing? But socializing is
a use in itself too, which we tend to forget (us stereotypically anti-social
hacker types... ;).

As an aside, the stereotype of the hacker as anti-social is quite a
contradiction to the idea of a hacker founder, since the founder is a leader,
front of the crowd. Us hackers these days seem to be turning that one on its
head :)

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TrevorJ
I work in post production for video. I remember a few years a go when the
movie Twister came out how all of a sudden everyone wanted a tornado in their
TV commercials. This year, it's super slo-o water simulations because that's
the great new thing software knows how to do. People are fickle and fad-
driven.

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bbgm
I wouldn't use the word "useful" per se. Social Networking does fill a need
and is useful to a bunch of people. What I'd like to see is more incentive and
recognition to those who push boundaries, whether it's in what the application
does or how it was built. Like someone said earlier, many of those apps exist,
but they get buried in the hype that social networks, etc get these days.

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shafqat
This whole obsession with 'social apps' and the next
Twitter/Digg/FriendFeed/XYX killer is really a product of the tech echo
chamber. Lets forget all that and build products for the mainstream. I'm
really focused on trying to build something that the masses want, not just the
niche techie/early adopter crowd. Forget the fun, unless its in
'fundamental'...riiiiight.

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breck
I wonder if it's because our generation rarely pays for software (since we've
grown up in a culture with Napster, Gnutella, and BitTorrent). We expect to
get every type of software for free. So the thought of developing software you
charge for is foreign to us, even though that's where the majority of revenue
in the industry comes from.

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mattjung
I don't see a contradiction between social and useful. Social networks are not
per se useful. But social networking features may boost the usefulness of an
application. See Flickr or Delicious as very prominent examples.

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babul
If the market you cater for does not need social elements than don't worry
about it. Focus on adding _value_ to the people you are creating for.

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giles_bowkett
2006, right after the VCs started backing again.

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athloi
The internet is AOL now, my friend. My condolences. Keep developing your
program. Most social apps end in failure because they have no use.

