> Would you wager there is more software written that is not web related and that it collectively makes more money than the stuff that is?
Absolutely. Software that runs warehouses. Payrolls. Manages inventory. Manages cash registers. Figures out how to optimize manufacturing across multiple vendors, multiple workstations. Robotics. Warehouse automation and robotics. Embedded systems. 3d rendering. Automated trading. Inventory control. Lot control. Pharmaceutical side effects tracking. Call centers, customer service...
Each of those, and ten thousand more, are all not web related, and each one of those has large communities of developers bigger than hacker news that bend their minds each and every day to the tasks at hand, and they're mostly not web related. Obscene amounts of money change hands every year for creating, maintaining, installing, and customizing all of those kinds of software.
Oracle's annual revenue is something like $100 billion, and it's just one player in a few of the above markets I mentioned. I'm not sure what SAP makes. But then also factor in the myriad of middlemen, integrators, and contractors, and it's a really large sum of money that goes into those things.
Web type businesses get more buzz because there is far more comparatively easy low-hanging fruit for effort vs. reward with a typical web business than in the world of enterprise software. Things like supply chain optimization are comparatively more mature and hashed out than things like making people's lives easier with computers, or connecting people and information in new and enriching ways.
There's still room for innovation in warehousing and so on, but the changes are more incremental, and you have to work harder for each advance than you do with web type companies. The progress still comes, and impacts our lives (witness Wal-Mart, lowering prices for everyone through awesome, difficult, supply chain optimization efforts), but it takes way more work to make a difference than it does with "web" businesses.
Absolutely. Software that runs warehouses. Payrolls. Manages inventory. Manages cash registers. Figures out how to optimize manufacturing across multiple vendors, multiple workstations. Robotics. Warehouse automation and robotics. Embedded systems. 3d rendering. Automated trading. Inventory control. Lot control. Pharmaceutical side effects tracking. Call centers, customer service...
Each of those, and ten thousand more, are all not web related, and each one of those has large communities of developers bigger than hacker news that bend their minds each and every day to the tasks at hand, and they're mostly not web related. Obscene amounts of money change hands every year for creating, maintaining, installing, and customizing all of those kinds of software.
Oracle's annual revenue is something like $100 billion, and it's just one player in a few of the above markets I mentioned. I'm not sure what SAP makes. But then also factor in the myriad of middlemen, integrators, and contractors, and it's a really large sum of money that goes into those things.
Web type businesses get more buzz because there is far more comparatively easy low-hanging fruit for effort vs. reward with a typical web business than in the world of enterprise software. Things like supply chain optimization are comparatively more mature and hashed out than things like making people's lives easier with computers, or connecting people and information in new and enriching ways.
There's still room for innovation in warehousing and so on, but the changes are more incremental, and you have to work harder for each advance than you do with web type companies. The progress still comes, and impacts our lives (witness Wal-Mart, lowering prices for everyone through awesome, difficult, supply chain optimization efforts), but it takes way more work to make a difference than it does with "web" businesses.