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Comment by axisK | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I misread the article but I didn't get the sense that the $2.3M was in the last year. If the company has been operating for just over a dozen years that could be total revenue which given the type of software really isn't all that alarming.

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If the company has been operating for over a dozen years, I'd expect to see product info on their website. Why is it practically empty? Kinda weird if you ask me.

When you work business-to-business in an industry with few players and mostly fixed relationships, you pretty much never get new clients through your website. Especially for service providers in this industry it's much more about your reputation and network. So it's not as strange as you would normally think when a company does not have a decent website, although it's clearly something that could be fixed without too much work.

(Also don't forget that any specifics you put out there is potentially new information to your competitors.)

I've known successful software companies with no websites, yet alone bare websites. Sometimes it works better to focus purely on building relationships and not to waste time on hoping potential customers will find you online.

A friend of mine works for a large private investment firm. He runs their very large Oracle databases. The webpage is a picture of a sailboat with the only text being the postal and email addresses to their various offices. That is their entire web presence.

Most non-web companies don't have a large web presence. Nothing weird about that.

You'd be surprised. I have dealt with a large number of specialized software vendors and very few have websites of any usefulness.

There are a lot of small shops out there selling one of a few packages that everyone in the industry (whatever industry it is) uses and they have been doing it for 20 years. It's a different world. They are frequently making millions selling desktop software that's not very effective and without any marketing budget.

Can you share any examples? Sounds like a fun weekend project to try to put one of those companies out of business :)

It's hard since so many don't have websites, but think about blue collar service industris (mechanics, plumbers, car washes, etc). Here's a company that kills it selling web based software to auto glass replacement facilities. It looks like it is out of 1995:

http://www.edirectglass.com/default.htm

That's is about as hip and modern as I have seen.

This is the website for Berkshire Hathaway - http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Just wow:

BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY

Well, it does look like it was made with a WYSIWYG editor using Trident (MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828) for visual layout. With "what you see is what you get" can sometimes be "what you get is what you don't see".

My favorite is the anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor. This happens twice for reasons that don't seem to exist since no link on the page apparently points to them.

I'm curious what their "web" presence looked like in 1978, which is the initial copyright date listed at the bottom of that page.

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