HN is mostly a place where technologists gather, not corporate heads of IT or other business people. This is especially true of the subset of users who actively participate rather than only reading.
And it is not unusual in the least for an enterprise product to be wildly profitable but not admired by technologists. Indeed, it's the default; Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc.
What is interesting is to look for examples of things that break this mold, that are both profitable and mostly admired. Frankly, I can't think of any... All the ones I can think of were out-competed and either acquired and ruined or just run out of business. Maybe RedHat is the closest example... I'm not sure though.
What's interesting is the substance of the complaints of those products. Most of the comments are complaining that Splunk is expensive, but no comments I've seen are complaining that it doesn't work or do as advertised. Same for Oracle DB. It's ungodly expensive, and there are (many) other options out there, but you don't really see complaints that it's not able to perform (after an expensive consultant has had a go at your companies checkbook). The Fedex and Paypals of the world can afford to pay for Cisco/Splunk and Oracle licenses.
What's interesting is things that break this mold, like Microsoft Teams, because that's something that can be disrupted, and thus be successful, by having a better product.
F# is nice but seems like a fairly conventional functional language. My first reaction to some of the features of Koka (also MS) was I didn't know that was even possible.
Cloudflare's verify human challenge screen is so intrusive and frustrating that it will cost them their credibility IMHO, if it hasn't already. Some part of me feels that a properly designed cache should be able to handle any level of abusive traffic like a p2p cache would, and if it can't, then what are we all doing?
The problem is a cache needs cooperation with the backend for invalidation: Cloudflare’s robot check can apply to every page right before it talks to the backend at all
But I don't think there's really a great place to get a zeitgeist of the rest of the population. I think they're mostly doing other stuff rather than talking about technology on internet forums. (They're smarter than us.)
Actually yeah, closer than most. I think it's a somewhat grudging admiration at this point, increasingly so as they do more and more also-ran services.
But yeah, this does seem right for the "core" services; ec2, s3, maybe lambda, etc.
AWS business model is to just literally take a popular OSS system and provide it as a service.
It was like that from the beginning. That's why there's much less animosity towards AWS, because they just allow you to run your X without the overhead of infra investment.
That is something they do, which I strongly dislike, but it isn't their business model. Their business model is "pay us to run things on our infrastructure instead of building your own, with an option to be billed based on your usage".
The "take a popular OSS system and provide it as a service" thing is a complement to that business model, because they can say "now that you're using our infrastructure, you can also use all these services, and we'll manage it for you, and you'll only have a single vendor to pay". It provides additional value and lock-in to the business model, but isn't the essential part of it.
And no, that isn't where it began. Providing managed services for open source systems was not a part of their initial value proposition. When I started using EC2 (with EBS and S3), one of the tricky things was getting our own database infrastructure to work reliably on EC2.
It's true that RDS was released not long after, and did the "take a popular OSS system" thing, but they really didn't embrace that model until years later. Indeed, I think RDS still seems like second fiddle to their proprietary non-relational DB service.
Maybe in the beginning. Taking an OSS package, cloning its wire protocol, and then offering their closed source almost-compatible version without having to contribute anything back upstream earns them a lot of animosity.
It's pretty wild to read some of these comments. Splunk is one of the best products I've ever used, bar none. The price is another matter (it's bloody expensive, no doubt about it), but the tool is amazing. I think all the people talking about how much it sucks and can be easily replaced are so far off base they aren't even in the stadium.
You've clearly never run it at scale nor have you migrated between Enterprise (on-prem) and Splunk Cloud at scale. Managing .conf files and eliminating intermediate IDM logic was absolutely not "amazing."
Everything on HN should be taken with a big ol' bag of salt. To do otherwise will cause you to miss out on both employment and investment opportunities you won't find elsewhere.
Definitely true that HN comments should be taken with a grain of salt from a business / investment / employment perspective.
But it's more useful - though still not the full story at all of course - as a finger on the pulse of the people who actually implement software products, rather than their business models and their sales and marketing.
This is not intended to downplay the importance of any of those things! Those people are just not the majority of the audience here. (I honestly wish I knew where they hang out, but I'm not sure there is such a place - all the people I know in those roles just play their cards much closer to their chests than those of us who participate here.)
It's not really a pulse of implementers either. It's a particular kind of engineer. Having been early in a big tech and watching it grow and now being in another startup, I can tell you that the attitudes for SaaS in the industry are much more either positive or calculating than the broad negative attitudes and the constant calls for NIH on here. If anything they remind me of my cohort of college undergrads, excited to write lots of code and poo-poo existing solutions because of how "easy" they are. Our attitudes changed once our time was worth more.
As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? The community chants grift, scam, and enshittification at pretty much any change in the customer contract these days. Is that the kind of environment that someone on the business side will find welcoming?
Well, nothing can give a fully accurate pulse, because response bias is pretty much inescapable. There's always a huge part of the iceberg that is submerged. To me, HN rings as a truer pulse of "silicon valley / startupy software developers" than the alternatives on reddit or twitter or mastodon or elsewhere that I've read to a significant degree. Everyplace has its own unique culture with their own unique echo chambers and blind spots driven by the people who opt in to that particular place, and HN is no different.
But having said that, your comment (and the thread-starter) is a pretty good example of "getting a pulse"! A pulse isn't just "the average viewpoint", it also includes the distribution. And for every bit of conventional HN wisdom like "splunk sucks and is too expensive", there is pretty much always a comment like "splunk is pretty successful, actually". Your "I've been around a long time and attitudes toward SaaSes are actually pretty positive or at least calculating" is part of the "pulse" in this thread.
To wit: I honestly had no idea about splunk. I played with it in the distant past and thought "cool!", but I've never used it in the auspices of an enterprise license, and I've certainly never tried to purchase one myself, so I just didn't know anything about this. And if you had asked me about their recent earnings, I would have similarly had no clue. I just had no idea what the "pulse" on splunk was, either way. And now, because of the zeitgeisty comments making fun of how expensive it is, and also the comments like yours and the thread-starter's pushing back on that narrative, I have an updated prior on the splunk. It surely isn't the full story, and I wouldn't walk into a conversation and be all "I'm an expert on splunk, folks!", but I have a much better sense than I did a few hours ago. That's what I mean by "pulse".
> As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here?
I didn't say I think they'd be here... I'm the one who pointed out that they aren't! Honestly not sure how you read into my comment what you seem to have read into it. But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to rant a bit!
I read everything I can consume (news, analysis, mailing lists, etc), but find smaller or private forums to be most valuable for participation. "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
Splunk was an absolute game changer when a company I worked for bought it. I say bought because we started to pay for it before anyone actually used it for anything meaningful. The "adoption" (blaming the company that bought it not Splunk) was terrible and teams were left to find value or not at their discretion without onboarding/training.
The tool itself when I started using it was brilliant and quite deep on capabilities.
All that said, the cost structure for the product can and SHOULD scare away any SMBs. Hosted or cloud, you're probably paying way beyond the value it's bringing in. That's probably the single largest determinant to the product.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/23/splunk-shares-surge-stro...