
Billions without Buzz - kryptiskt
http://www.ericsink.com/entries/billion_dollar_apps.html
======
petercooper
Reading between the lines somewhat, there's an eye-opening point embedded here
that is often missed by the ultra-connected in my experience. That is, the
majority of people in our industry (let's say that's software development, for
the sake of argument) are _not_ on Twitter every day, are not famous, do not
have significant social media presence in respect to their jobs, are not on
Hacker News, and so on.. and they're a huge, important, and profitable market
that is often overlooked by those who assume everyone _is_ reading HN or
hanging out on Twitter all the time.

~~~
mbesto
People in this "digitally connected" world often overlook any product that
doesn't produce high DAU/MAUs. It's the single metric driving a huge sector of
tech today. Often, digital influence (likes, klout scores, etc) are the
symptoms of large amount of gold miners chasing gold bars in the shape of
MAUs/DAUs. I don't want to discredit those who do so (it's clearly profitable
to some extent), but there is a huge market that doesn't include the $17bil
Uber's of the world...industries that have been around for centuries, that
rarely get press (because they also don't drive today's eyeballs).

That being said, those same markets have never heard of Haskell, Rails,
Erlang, Backbone and the latter, which could in fact drive real solutions for
their problems. This is really (IMHO) where real economic value can be had,
and the potential is in the trillions of dollars. I like patio's sentiment
(not verbatim) of "99% of the businesses out there still don't have web
solutions".

~~~
forsaken
I have no idea what a DAU/MAU is..

~~~
147
Daily/Monthly active users.

------
jacques_chester
I've written elsewhere before[1] about the fact that journalists give us all a
skewed interpretation of what's actually going on and where the money is.

Far more of the world's wealth is flowing between companies than between
consumers and companies; but those flows are only visible to those close to
them. But every journalist is a consumer, so they are all "experts" on
whatever the final consumer-facing products are. Hence, those products get the
attention and we overestimate their importance.

[1] [http://chester.id.au/2013/01/05/on-selling-to-
consumers/](http://chester.id.au/2013/01/05/on-selling-to-consumers/)

------
pitchups
>"Companies who still need high growth to justify their stock price (read:
Apple) are distressed about the notion that everybody on the planet who can
afford a smart phone already has one"

Not true - India has ~800+ million mobile subscribers and only ~100+ million
of them currently have smartphones. So there is a huge market waiting to be
tapped - although Apple may still be distressed as 90%+ of these 700 million
potential customers are probably going to buy a sub-$100 smartphone made by
the likes of Micromax and running Android...

------
inthewoods
Just my opinion, but to me cloud is more disruptive to B2B than mobile. Not
that mobile doesn't have some level of impact that varies by industry, but
most people working in my office aren't using their mobile phones and tablets
for data input - a key action that is performed by most office workers. For
B2B, therefore, web will likely be #1 and then they will have a mobile app
that exist to reference into that system and do some specialized tasks. In
this way, the mobile app is just another application accessing the same system
vs. a mobile app that exists on it's own (such as, say, Instagram).

As an example, Salesforce.com, the "standard" in SaaS CRM has a mobile app,
but the majority of the time users are in front of a laptop or computer during
the day. They may use the mobile app on the go, but people are not walking
around our office using these apps - they're at their desks where they've got
a keyboard.

This obviously varies by industry - I'm sure people can provide examples where
it would make a big difference (thought of one: services businesses with a lot
of remote/scheduled workers ala lawncare).

Cloud infrastructure has been disrupting both in the delivery of SaaS
applications and lowering the cost of developing and delivering a service. I'm
just not seeing mobile having the same level of impact. The fact that most
mobile apps that support SaaS applications are thrown in with the service may
show that they don't add huge value to overall revenue a SaaS company may see.

------
alexbratton
As the partial subject of Eric's post it's awesome to see more people getting
into these topics (although I wasn't expecting to have my twitter follower
count ever be a topic of discussion, thanks Eric). My focus is on helping
these enterprise leaders understand the big impact of tech for process
improvement and driving change. This is a very under served market that more
of us from the tech side need to see (and step away from the latest shiny new
language/platform/gadget once in a while).

I agree that much of the enterprise focused work out there draws less
attention today, but I expect that to change. As these businesses reinvent the
way they run using mobile that's going to drive big changes to how most people
do their jobs. That's also going to mean better ways of connecting consumers
directly with organizations (the power of mobile goes beyond connect people to
information and really lies in connecting people to each other).

As we see industries change the way they do business it'll be more apparent.
With leaders like Sonic Automotive changing the car buying process with iPads
in the hands of all sales people so that one person can find you a car,
appraise the trade in, work the finances and sign the deal -- without bringing
anyone else into the discussion -- that takes a lot of pain we all have felt
out of the process.

------
morgante
> Companies who still need high growth to justify their stock price (read:
> Apple)

Terrible example. Apple in fact has a very low P/E for this sector (it's 1/2
that of Google). Apple could have zero growth and remain highly profitable for
years.

~~~
ericsink
"Apple could have zero growth and remain highly profitable for years."

Sure they could. But Wall Street would punish their stock price anyway.

Not everything about the way AAPL fluctuates is rational. Maybe NOTHING about
it is rational. :-)

But the concerns about Apple's ability to sustain its ridiculous growth ARE
quite real. Their growth IS slowing.

~~~
x0x0
but doesn't the low p/e indicate most growth is already priced out of apple?

as of today (numbers from yahoo finance):

    
    
       tick  p/e
       amzn  506
       fb     87.6
       goog   30.25
       csco   16.67
       intc   16.55
       hp     16.29
       msft   15.83
       appl   15.4
       ibm    12.4
       twtr   n/a (<0)
       (sorted descending)

~~~
tempestn
One would think so. It's nice to see a company with a lot of buzz have a
reasonable p/e. (As the largest company in the world, how massive could it's
growth really be?) I personally had no idea it was so low - especially
compared to the likes of Amazon. Of course the price could still drop if
earnings do.

------
tempestn
I know it's ironic given the larger point of this post that I came out of it
with a tangential technical question, but... Can anyone elaborate on this?

 _Databases. When you have 500 million users, you can 't afford unique
constraints and foreign keys in the db layer anymore._

Is he just saying that fully featured RMDBs don't have the performance to
handle that scale? It seems like in some applications those checks will be
necessary, and often the db will be the most efficient place for them. Not
everything makes sense as nosql. Maybe I'm missing the point though.

~~~
ericsink
Yeah, I'm saying that this is one of the issues that brought the popularity of
nosql databases. Constraints are expensive, and you can gain performance
(while accepting greater risk) if you remove them.

But it's actually a little more complicated than I make it sound above. By
removing things like unique constraints and foreign keys from the database
layer, you also end up with a design that can much more easily scale out
instead of up. Distributed database. Lots and lots of nodes. etc.

NoSQL databases have their place.

Traditional SQL databases do too.

------
gaadd33
> Manufacturing. Foxconn is enormous. What was the biggest manufacturing
> facility on earth before the iPhone?

Is that claiming that Foxconn has the largest (by size) manufacturing facility
in the world? I would expect that the Boeing Everett Factory still claims that
title by a long shot.

~~~
ericsink
Well, I'm guessing Foxconn is the biggest by _some_ measure. ;-)

------
jchrisa
> It won't re-challenge our notions of scale. (Walmart's 2.2 million employees
> would be a small user base by today's standards.)

But sensors on everything in their supply chain are where the growth is. How
many items per day does Walmart transport?

~~~
mrkurt
That's not where growth is, that's just the source of the largest volume of
data. Mobile productivity apps (actually, most apps) don't need a huge volume
of data, they need to do valuable things for a group of people.

~~~
jchrisa
If you are in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of shipping containers,
it'd be nice to browse their individual temperature readings on a tablet,
without relying on the cloud.

