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Exactly this. Big names want big money which small businnes don't have and small businnes already got burned badly by fresh internet startups last time around.

Also, few bigs target small business because, let's be honest, they're a pain to work with at scale, each one of them brings variations to the base product flavor but no budget to implement them.

Hence, loads of them run off custom excel sheets.

I once proposed to have a sort of web excel with security controls and a way to let authenticated guests to work on a subset of cells as a way to move small businness online leaving control to them of their process implementation but couldn't find a sponsor.

The non-profit I work for has been using airtable+zapier for precisely these needs.

I think a fundamental grasp of relational databases is a very handy skill.

> Big names want big money which small businnes don't have

Isn't that really the end of the discussion since we've come to the answer to the question?

If small businesses were limited to buying from "big names", then, yes, not having the money to buy would be the end of the discussion. But, tech is available from many sources with various combinations of off-the-shelf and custom solutions, free & commercial, and various levels of skill & time required from vendor and/or buyer.

So, the end of the discussion would have to be something more complex, ex: We don't have the skills to use the free stuff, or the money to hire people who do, or the money to pay for anything commercial that is good enough to not require a lot of skill, or the time and skill it would probably take to evaluate an ever-changing haystack of good-in-theory-bad-in-practice options looking for a useful needle....

few bigs target small business because, let's be honest, they're a pain to work with at scale

It's not that difficult, it's just incentivized in our not-so-free market. Big companies can afford lawyers and lobbyists and they get all the best tax breaks and subsidies. Small companies, not so much.

each one of them brings variations to the base product flavor but no budget to implement them

Yep, because the base product is designed for the large clients.

It's all incentives to target big companies. Why do you need permissions and user account management in your software? Because you're dealing with 20+ people and you may not know everyone in your company and if they can be trusted. Why do you have a base product that requires at least 10,000 database items in it to be useful? Because the big companies have that many items and they've got a monopoly or oligopoly on the market.

I once proposed to have a sort of web excel with security controls and a way to let authenticated guests to work on a subset of cells as a way to move small businness online leaving control to them of their process implementation but couldn't find a sponsor.

This is actually what should and would happen in a free market. The majority of companies are not very large; most of them have a bit of extra cash to invest in a tool like that. There is a definite market for it. But why isn't that market pursued? All of the above incentives mentioned above.

Big companies can afford lawyers and lobbyists and they get all the best tax breaks and subsidies. Small companies, not so much.

What does that have to do with business-to-business transactions? Microsoft doesn't care about your subsidies. Oracle doesn't care about your tax breaks. All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract.

This is actually what should and would happen in a free market.

This sort of coordination problem is actually a classic failure of free markets (it was even covered in my Economics 101 course). Coase's Theorem only applies when transaction and negotiation costs are zero. In any real world scenario where transaction costs are nonzero, you'll see failures like this.

"All they care about is how many users you can bring or how many zeroes you can put on the contract."

Which is influenced by the subsidies you get. Some industries more than others. The extreme case is the agricultural industry in the USA. Many of the big wheat firms would not exist without the vast subsidies offered by the government. For those firms, Oracle or Microsoft are only talking to you because you've gotten money from the government.

Why was this downvoted? It's a straightforward statement of the facts.

They not only get subsidies, Microsoft and Oracle get to rely on patents and intellectual "property". They absolutely do care about tax breaks.

I work for a company which does pursue that market (we have everything from the sole freelancer to companies with thousands of workers), and I disagree.

Regarding your example, most of our clients with 2-5 users do ask us to set up different permissions. In fact, I'd say that worrying about that is much more common in small companies, where the manager is often the owner and therefore often hates losing control of the processes.

In terms of database items, the correlation does tend to hold, but the one thing about SMBs is that they vary a lot. If you ignore all those edge cases, you end up targeting just a small subset of the whole market.

And the last point is crucial. You write about the "needs of big companies" and "needs of small companies", but in general there's no such thing. Each company, large or small, has its own needs, and a cookie-cutter solution - even if generally targeted to "small companies" - is simply insufficient for many. But while a large company can pay well to accommodate its idiosyncrasies, a small company can't, because those needs don't shrink proportionally to the budget.

But I wouldn't say the market isn't being served, and the current bet on SaaS is a clear bet on SMBs, which often can't afford to pay for the purchase and maintenance of servers and the sysadmins to manage them.

Also, few bigs target small business because, let's be honest, they're a pain to work with at scale

Absolutely. A big business has the clout to request features and demand support. A small business might not even be able to get anyone on the phone, let alone get an on-site rep or have a feature added.

Hence, loads of them run off custom excel sheets.

We use a few spreadsheets and a custom POS system developed in house by me on top of OSS. It's portable and endlessly customizable. I don't have to worry about propriety file formats, services outages, changing terms or cost increases.

How do you handle credit card integrations, any repos I can look at? I can help you with easily integrating the former by the way, no reason not to get integrated payments.

I'll echo your sentiments.

I've done consulting and development for small businesses for nearly 3 decades now, and what I LOVE about dealing with small business owners and managers, is that they usually have great ideas and sophisticated models of things that they would like to implement. Stuff that I can get really excited about building for them.

What I hate about small business is the very small budget that they have to work with traditionally. I've had so many project that, for $50-60K would yield a killer solution that would revolutionise their business and (tick all that apply): [] make money [] save time [] increase productivity, but been only given something like a $10K budget...

One thing I've observed about very small businesses is that the owners are very tight with money because they perceive it as coming right out of their own pockets. They are direct stakeholders in the success or failure of any proposed project.

In contrast, the managers at a larger business are betting somebody else's money, so they are not stakeholders at all. They know that the anticipated cost over-runs and under-performance will be absorbed by the larger business.

So the manager at the big business is inclined to be optimistic about the project, and at the small business, pessimistic.

I exhibit both of those personalities at once, since I work for a large business but run my own small side-business. The big business runs on SAP, the small one on Excel 2010.

Another problem for the small business is that there is less of an obvious relationship between time, productivity, and actually making more money, due to the problem of scaling. Many businesses rise up to the volume that they can sustain without running into scaling obstacles.

You said it right!

Plus a million. I helped a small business get their point of sale software back online by re-installing Windows XP on their unlabeled OEM server. The installed the system over a decade ago. Explain to a small business how this system will continue to be serviceable for 15 years and they will consider buying it.

Tangentially related, but just last night I updated the first application I ever wrote for pay, because the small business I wrote it for saw no need to invest in new tech while this one still served their needs. I wrote it about 15 years ago (coincidentally) in Classic ASP. All it needed was a small JS update to get the menu system to be compatible with modern browsers. Instead of spending $10k+ on a new system, they spent $500 on an update that will serve them for the foreseeable future (or however long Access databases will be supported - lol). Granted, it took the owner about a year to track me down, since I'm not on social media and have a full time gig now, but the system was serviceable 15 years later. I got a kick out of the entire experience.

There's also a difference between existing small businesses and ones that were recently set up. If you have minimal or no tech infrastructure, you can spend on the new stuff because that's the best of the market at the moment. If you're an existing business you need a maintenance and transition plan.

"So we figured what the hell, jumped on in"

Probably not a wise business planning strategy :)

"ever since then, that bookstore has been very apprehensive about "new tech"

Probably not very wise either.

>>So we figured what the hell, jumped on in, got some iPad bundles from Square to use for this [...]

Did your employer at least ask for a refund from Square?

The money they spent with Square for this was probably not the biggest cost... it was the cost of setting it up, learning how to use it, getting customers used to it, etc.