Software will eat software in a remote-first world

Re:Software will eat software in a remote-first world by davish on Monday May 25, 2020 @09:46AM (#23301028)

I think it's difficult to say how many merchants went from hosting their own e-commerce site that engineers built for them from scratch, and transitioned to Etsy, Ebay, etc., laying off the developers they hired in the process. Without numbers to back myself up, I would say that there are certainly many more developers and engineers working on E-Commerce today than ten or twenty years ago. Services like Stripe certainly help businesses focus less on setting up common parts of a website or online business, but that just leaves people more time to focus on the "business logic" that is unique to them.

The "current stack" may certainly be ripe for disruption. But I'd predict that rather than put developers out of work, it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold who may not have had the resources for developing their own solutions beforehand. There will always be companies with the resources to demand custom solutions to fit their particular business needs.

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Re:Software will eat software in a remote-first world by petra on Monday May 25, 2020 @10:55AM (#23301701)

>> it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold

When we look at various platforms, we see that big business and startups are extracting all of the repeatable, low-risk tasks of most businesses(supply chain, customer service(bots), manufacturing(on demand), design(partially automated design services) etc), leaving businesses to do mostly marketing and betting on products/services, and getting less of the rewards.

So what we end up seeing, is either less small businesses(i think kaufmann institute showed stats about that), or tiny companies with almost everything outsourced - and tiny companies usually require little custom internal software(they often use their supplier IT system).

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