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Because that car repair company with 3 local stores previously couldn't justify building custom software to make their business more efficient and aligned with what they need. The cost was too high. Now they might be able to.

Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't realistically build it before.

by cityofdelusion3 hours ago|

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I see no way that company would save more money from hiring an experienced developer compared to paying their yearly invoice on the COTS product doing the same thing today. The only way this works is with a very wage suppressing effect.

by aurareturn1 hours ago|

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Off the shelf software could still cost thousands per year and I'm sure they don't do everything the shops need them to do.

by jimbokun3 hours ago|

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Car repair companies won’t see a meaningful improvement to their bottom line with more custom software. Will it increase the number of cars per employee per day they can repair?

by trollbridge2 hours ago|

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I do bespoke work like this, but mostly to replace software that’s starting to cost mid 5 figure amounts per year for a SaaS setup and the support phone line has been replaced by an LLM chat bot.

by RHSeeger6 hours ago|

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What makes you think they'll be doing the same thing?

by gloxkiqcza7 hours ago|

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There’s always more problems to be solved. Some of them just weren’t financially feasible before.

by awesome_dude2 hours ago|

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This is one of the key "inefficiencies" of the private sector - there might be one winner at the end of the day providing the product that fills the market niche, but there was always multiple competitors giving it a go in the mean time.

A recent example, Mitchell Hashimoto was pointing out that he wasn't "first to market" with his product(s), he was (at least) SEVENTH

by roncesvalles1 hours ago|

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Almost tautologically it's not "inefficient" to do so, because free market economics has decided that all the attempts are mathematically worth it, for a high-margin low-marginal-cost product like software.

by awesome_dude1 hours ago|

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I'm a little lost as to why seven teams duplicating effort is more "efficient" in any sense of the word than one or two teams working iteratively toward the same goal.

If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently.

Edit: fixed some typos caused by fat fingers on a phone keyboard

by roncesvalles19 minutes ago|

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The benefit from having a 5% better product that hundreds of millions of people will use is worth the duplicated effort in the beginning. The numbers just make sense.

>If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem

The problem here is "government funded" - the trials are not rationalized by free-market economics. That is, a 5% better product in the end would not be worth seven competing developments initially.