is the entire developer tool market bad, or just the db sector is bad?
developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.
developer tool market seems to be the only one I'm familiar with as an engineer. If I were to start a business, I will probably also do something for this market.
In general, it's much better to be in a market where you customers cannot do you your job, not just one where they don't want to do your job. In the latter markets, they start asking "Why should I pay you to do something I can do myself?", or just start doing it themselves, and that holds down the price you can charge.
This applies to a lot of familiar service businesses as well: housekeepers, gardeners, delivery/taxi/rideshare drivers, childcare, etc. Think of how much a doctor gets paid vs. a nurse vs. a home healthcare worker. The difference is all in skills that the provider can do but the customer cannot.
Fundamentally, business is about specialisation. Your customers always have the option of becoming jacks-of-all-trades but generally recognise it's best not to. Obviously if the value you're selling is so thin that your customers regularly and genuinely feel they could roll their own without incurring much cost, that's no good, but that's going to typically be the case in the early days before you had a chance to build up much value.
So it is with companies bringing core competencies in-house. Each step takes time, and is fraught with risk. It's not a matter of simply hiring people with the right skillsets. You need to know what the right skillsets are, and how to judge them. You need to hire managers and executives to oversee them. You need to convince all of the above people that they should work for this new company that's just entering the market and may reconsider in a couple years, vs. stick with their bread and butter that's been doing it for decades. Company leadership needs to prioritize integrating the new competency, which often means challenging a lot of their assumptions about how the business works. Investors need to be on board: integrating your suppliers often does bad things to your margins and costs. Tooling and capital investments need to be made, and they can take years to plan out and execute.
With developer tools specifically, the alternative to buying the product is often "We'll have a team of engineers spend a quarter or two building something that is specific to our needs", and no changes need to be made at the management/executive/personnel/financial levels. If, say, you're building a SaaS for a non-tech business, the alternative is "We need to learn how to manage software development processes, and hire a bunch of engineers, and get executive buy-in, and re-build the communication pathways in our org so this new division knows what to build." A lot of businesses actually try this, but the results have been predictably bad, and that creates a ready market for non-tech SaaS vendors.
In practice one company acquiring another, or even just poaching some employees, is a common thing that happens so frequently we take it for granted. When Apple acquired PA Semi nobody batted an eyelid even though they were in-sourcing something as complex and difficult as CPU design. And there are many examples outside of the computing industry too.
With developer tools specifically, the alternative to buying the product is often "We'll have a team of engineers spend a quarter or two building something that is specific to our needs"
If it takes a small team of engineers only six months to roll their own version of your product, that's what I meant by the value proposition being quite thin (or your price being too high). Also, most companies outside of very rich tech firms will not actually staff up an entire project just to clone a tool they could acquire off the shelf, unless that really is the only reasonable path forward e.g. their needs genuinely are unique.
Now, in computing we do have the issue that the prevalence of VC money, and indifference of VCs to whether it's being well spent, has created a large population of "very rich tech firms" with lots of apparently bored engineers working at them. So they spend a lot of time churning out open source frameworks that they maintain for a few years and then abandon, even when they could have used something else. That's rather unique to software but I don't think it's something inherent to developers as a type of person. Rather, it's inherent to a market where money is free and firms compare themselves to each other by the sheer size of their engineering teams. Outside of the Valley that problem mostly goes away.
Another analogy: Tesla's customers get the idea to just design and build their own cars instead.
Thanks for an insightful reply -- slightly helps me when thinking about my own projects
Yeah, but those are outliers drowning in a sea of free development tools. The price that they can charge is effectively limited by how much it would cost some to replicate the subset of that tool that they actually use.
A business that is paying $X/year for $DEVSOFTWARE for their entire devteam pays that only while $X is less than the cost of paying for developing the subset of $DEVSOFTWARE that they use. That limits what Atlassian can charge.
Compare to selling a tool to accountants - it doesn't matter how much $ACCSOFTWARE costs, the accounting department will only shop around, they will never just write their own (outliers excepted, of course).
I agree though that you should never sell to developers, most of them really don't care how they spend their time as long as they are occupied and work on something they deem interesting, so they will happily spend months or years reinventing existing solutions if given the opportunity (I've seen this again and again). You need to sell to the people that run the company and pay the developers or to the engineering management, because they know how much their developers cost, and they understand ROI better than they do. That said often developers are quite creative when making up reasons why not to use an external solution or tool and instead write it themselves, so whether you succeed in selling to a company depends on who's ultimately in charge of technology.
I worked for one and you're right, it was madness. They still did it though.
Things like a database would have to go through procurement if I wanted to use them and they weren’t free, and I avoid procurement like the plague.
Why the hell wants to spend their time justifying why something is the best solution to people that don’t have a clue.
I’d only go through that if the difference in quality was so palpable that I basically had no choice.
'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.'
https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328?lan...
But for the company I work for, I don't care. I would recommend my employer the fastest and easiest tool. And my employer usually don't want to spend engineering time on reinventing wheels.
If I were to launch a business in this market, the targeted customers can't be individual developers, more likely other businesses.
Like gihub, individual developers who only use their free account are part of github's marketing team.
I'd probably word it differently:
Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to make their own shovels to dig for gold (because it is often cheaper than buying).
It’s a colorscheme, yes, but you pay for the consistent support of over 160 apps, which is a big deal IMO. Heck, every program under the sun seems to offer a solarized dark theme, but they’re all wrong in different ways and use different accent colors for different things, so I rolled my own in a lot of cases to get an actually consistent appearance. It’s a huge hassle, and just paying 80$ would probably have saved money compared to the hours and days I spent manually theming stuff.
Take the internet for example - before the internet existed, the 'market' for the internet sucked.
For me, any company that failed due to solving too ambitious of a problem is the best kind group of people to invest into again and again until they succeed and succeed big. The people running it will have learned the easy lesson of solving a smaller problem faster, while retaining the chops to actually solve hard problems.
All too often, people fail because they solve too small of a problem - there was a recent discussion about that on here regarding a macos calendar widget.
Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support.
RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product.
Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work.
In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.
To break out of "developers making tools for developers" you need to get some domain knowledge.
Stuff I don't pay is stuff I feel I can do better if I had some free time and rather gets in the way than properly solve problems and stuff that tries to charge more than what they're worth which can be said for many online developer services.
Don't expect to make big bucks selling to single devs.
However... who you sell to isn't the people giving you GitHub stars and retweets, and they will have diff needs. if you lose sight of that....
I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.
You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
Even if there was a society like that, I don't think I'd want to go - not only did they go extinct, they don't have mRNA vaccines, spacecraft, and Telemundo soaps.
In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form.
In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, underpaid labor, serfdom, like you know, these rare things that happened through the centuries. So yeah, I suppose that idea is ‘still working itself out’ two thousand years later.
Fuck all that is my point, as many souls have been lost waiting for utopia. Ask the guys that built the pyramids.
What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural.
People seem to think that there is money, and before money, there was barter. That's fake news made up by economists (the barter before money bit).
People have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Money has been around for a few thousand in select places and never used for most transactions by most people until extremely recently.
I'd argue it's still not used for the most important transactions and the existence of food stamps, universal health care in every sane developed country, free education and subsidies for parents with children is simply some of the numerous examples of most people preferring free for things they deeply value and care about.
Money is great for veblen goods and exchange among adversaries, everything else wants to be free. Free as in decided based on factors other than money, not free as in oxygen.
I'm not articulating this too well, please have a look here for a take I'm trying to express, done by a proper journalist.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
If at any time people decide they no longer believe in home ownership, then the house I built for you had no value since no one will build my home when it’s my turn.
This wouldn’t be a problem if you just paid me cash since it stores value.
We can come up with pro and con examples for any set of ideas.
I remain of the mindset that monetary transactions within a community are a net negative, largely because I think human dignity should not be something you can purchase, sell or bargain for.
If we provide human dignity for every member and let money be something we use for nice-to-have items/services, that strikes me as a significant improvement.
It's been known as utopian since at least the time of Thomas More[1].
> What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural.
Yes, it's natural for that relationship. That does not mean that:
a) it applies to other kinds of relationship
b) it scales to all of society
In fact, it's that kind of thinking that leads to the authoritarianism of Confucianism, the tyranny of communism, and the stifling paternalism of western social democracy (among other things such as outright fascism).
Gifting worked amongst tribes because they're all related. As to Graeber, he's saying that slavery is the creation of money? No, he's too mealy mouthed for that “perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery”.
Wow, money enables slavery. What a pathetic attempt at insight and guilt by association.
Money is simply a better system than the competitors, as is liberalism - the wish that people be free to choose how they use their spending power (or gifting power, ha) - to its competitors. A gift economy was not able to lift almost the entire world out of poverty (and it will hopefully complete that effort soon[2]). Communism and socialism (not that there's a real difference) have only managed to emiserate and imprison every society it's been tried in. No thanks.
how is it bad when snowflake just had the biggest tech ipo of all time.