I know some authors in particular never, ever want to be sent story ideas. The potential of being accused of or sued for plagiarism down the track for something even vaguely similar is non-zero.
I’m sure the viewpoint from being in mergers and acquisitions is quite different (and to me, often comes across as quite callow). I’ve been a software developer for 35 years (closer to 45 if you include my pre-professional life, aka adolescence) and have deliberately stayed “on the tools” in my career with working in codebases and product development as I’ve found that is where I am happiest and can make the best contribution, rather than move up the managerial ladder to my level of incompetence, to quote Peter.
To create a successful product in IT, or any industry really, it takes a lot of different skills, facets and (often competing) priorities. And those priorities do change over time. I’m sure by the time a product or service crosses your desk, the codebase quality is not as big of a priority. Earlier in the life cycle a shit codebase makes for a shit product that is a lot harder to grow and maintain — so much so that most of them have probably folded before they reached the stage of looking to be merged or acquired. I’ve dabbled in sound mixing for live performance and when training others I’ve mentioned the fact that it very hard to make a bad singer or musician sound good, but very easy to make a good singer or musician sound bad. Same goes for trying to make what would otherwise have been a good product or service with a bad codebase. That’s really hard and creates a hell of a lot more work for every part of the business.
I’ve had sales people tell me to my face that they are the most important part of the business and the actual product or services is not that important. And in my more callow stages of life experience I’m pretty sure I’ve reciprocated with words like useless and parasitic, and that I could replace them with a small bash script. But in reality what we all do is important to the complex endeavour of developing and maintaining a successful product or service. The existential threat of AI is moving up the ladder of incompetence and changing the face of what we do. It may even jump a few rungs in the process. But it’s not there just yet. Keep making good sales, keep making good mergers, good products, good acquisitions, good services, and good codebases.
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Your argument is sound. It certainly takes a good deal of skill to create good code. And yes, good code makes it easier to create a better product.
And yes it's easier to build a better company on a better product.
But history is littered with "worse products" that won in the marketplace.
It turns out that all the attributes you name are helpful but not necessary. Good marketing trumps good product. We see this over and over again.
The best combination is good marketing and good product. If I can only get 1 of those then I'll take hood marketing. Equally if you have a good product but bad marketing you don't get many (if any) users. The "ask" section on this site is littered with that.
So, assuming we can all make "good enough" code, the code doesn't matter. It's all good enough. The distinguishing feature is the marketing, because that leads to market share, and that's all any company is really selling (once it sells for a lot).
I'm upvoting you because your comment is well made, and certainly common, even if it is incorrect:)
Having been involved in multiple different acquisitions, on both sides of the table, I can anecdote that the code quality had no impact on any part of the acquisitions. The players are not buying or selling the code.
Your entire argument hinges on "good enough". Problem is: you can never know if something is "good enough", except in hindsight for those products that succeeded.
I'm upvoting you because your comment is well made, and certainly common, even if it is nothing more than a tautology :)
The bar for "good enough" can be set quite low. In general, consumers can be convinced to buy almost anything. And their resistance to good marketing is very weak.
The problem with presenting good examples is that decades of sustained marketing is hard to overcome even with facts which are immediately obvious. Indeed good marketing has already negated those facts.
For example smoking is objectively terrible and yet was (and is) very popular for decades. Tobacco might be out, but vaping is still cool; same message as before.
From outside its easy to spot US examples because their absurdity is obvious to outsiders. It's harder to see examples in one's own society (because we have our own marketers.)
In software land there is obviously lots and lots of complete rubbish. Most of it gets no marketing at all. But is Windows the best OS? Is Chrome the best browser? Is Google the best search engine? Is Facebook the best social network?
Or do each of those have a competitor with "better code" that has no marketing and gets no traction?
When IBM hooked up with MS was it because of good code? When Sun bought MySql was it for the customer base, and Brand, or the code?
Did Facebook buy WhatsApp for 18 billion because of the code? Fo you think they compared the code to some other messenger with 100 users, or did the 400 million people using WhatsApp matter more?
In truth every product you ever heard of, and ever used, was good enough. Github is full of projects with really great code and no users.
There's a fundamental disconnect between business people and codesmiths. The programmer wants another year to craft perfection. The business needs to start selling and earning next week.
Good code lasts longer, and is better for the company in the long run. Engineers know this. Companies know they have to ship, and sell and earn, to survive at all. Engineers sneer at marketing, the product should be good enough. (Tell that to Amiga.) Marketeers are frustrated by Engineers who want to build forever and never ship. (Any wonder they want to replace us with AI.)
Yes AI products are objectively worse. But if history tells us anything; that doesn't matter.
But was Google the best search engine when they got popular? Most definitely! Chrome the best browser? According to most, yes! When MySQL got popular, that was also due to it being the best free product out there at the time.
That is to say, a good product can easily be the key factor to growth. Especially in the critical early phase. But it'll have to be a lot better than the well-known alternative.
I've been in an acquisition where code quality was important. But it was probably an edge case since the buyer just wanted to turn the company into a feature, and ease of integration into the buyer was important.
Counter-point: many acquisitions are not for the code itself but for the engineers who designed and wrote the code. Acquihire is almost exclusively used to describe acquiring engineering talent that can… design systems and write code.
> I’ve had sales people tell me to my face that they are the most important part of the business and the actual product or services is not that important.
Same here. This happened when I was 22 years old I didn't want to believe it.
BUT, I've seen far more shitty codebases win marketplaces with strong sales & marketing, than I've seen stellar codebases with shitty sales & marketplaces win marketplaces.
I think this perspective benefits from experience, the ability to step outside one’s self, see that the world is complicated, then focus on the thing you enjoy.
As much as I agree with you now, I also accept that younger me wouldn’t have!
That's a common misquotation of 1 Timothy 6:10 from the bible, which is that the love of money is the root of all evil. Not to get theological, but I reckon it's an important and informative distinction.
Allergies are weird. I definitely became more sensitive to hay fever after a gastric bypass.
I have a friend who for no apparent reason developed strong allergies in their sixties. Particularly to goats milk.
So much so that they will not go to a restaurant that has goat milk products (e.g.: halloumi cheese) in their kitchen due to one too many visits to the hospital emergency ward.
My father also developed allergies in his sixties. And it got worse and worse. Soon he was becoming lactose intolerant as well, and had to start with gluten-free food. He could never be near oranges, unless they were grown without pesticides - the remains on the outside was enough to trigger a reaction. Then he couldn't eat farmed salmon, though he could still eat wild salmon. But there was more and more wild fish he couldn't eat either, which did hurt a fish lover like him. And on and on it went, until he was severely limited to what he could eat and what he could get exposed to.
Then one day he noticed that the mayonnaise he enjoyed every day contained a conservation additive (an E-type, as is how they're labelled in Europe) which he knew he used to have some reaction to in the past, another food product included it and he had avoided that one since like forever. So he quit the mayonnaise when he noticed that. But what happened next was astonishing - all his allergies, lactose intolerance and everything disappeared, and not much later he didn't have any issues with anything.
Even better, if your subtitle is labelled "English SDH" instead of just "English", when you enable subtitles it helpfully picks the first foreign language subtitle track instead — so you get the bonus feature of having the pause the show and manually changing it before continuing!
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