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Ask HN: Has all interesting desktop software already been written?

by nkobeissi on 5/22/16, 2:58 PM with 102 comments

• by clarry on 5/22/16, 4:10 PM

  I don't think all the interesting stuff has been written. But more importantly, I think a lot of the existing software is just terrible. Big old monsters that can be time consuming to learn, and which kinda lock you in for numerous reasons. Horribly inefficient cluttered user interfaces, with old paradigms that aren't necessarily a great way to interact with the computer... I think there's a lot of innovation to be made.

  Money? That's harder, unfortunately. It's hard to innovate when people want to cling on to what they already know. Make an image processing & digital painting utility, and people would only complain that it's not photoshop. Make a word processor, people complain that it's not MS Office.

• by dragonbonheur on 5/22/16, 3:14 PM

  NO. All the interesting desktop software has NOT already been written.

  Short example: there aren't many - if any - desktop word processing software with word or phrase completion, so that's one thing you could still do and sell if you wanted to.

  Another example: you could port the majority of desktop software from Windows to Linux and sell that to companies who want to lower their costs with Linux. Even if windows was essentially a free upgrade for a time, it won't be forever.

  Some would argue that there are libre or free as in free beer software clones of Windows desktop software available, often they will cite GIMP as a suitable replacement for Photoshop, or LibreOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office etc., but you can always find a situation that makes you wish you were running the original on Windows instead of fighting against tersely-documented software with their fair share of quirks.

  Finally the desktop software term may be becoming more vague with time, the reason for that is because Android is being modifies to run software in a windowing interface by at least two companies right now, one of them being RemixOS. Also, single board computers equivalent to the Raspberry Pi are often able to run the Debian distribution for ARM. so that's another reason to program more Linux desktop software.

• by therealmarv on 5/22/16, 3:38 PM

  Desktop is for sure at the end of the hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle but that does not mean that you cannot make money or not be successful when you write a very good software or you hit a particular niche. And I would not fear Google or Apple, I cannot remember when Google did the last time a rich and good desktop app for end consumers (was it Picasa, the last one?) and the only big professional desktop app I use from Apple (beside the OS) is Final Cut Pro. They (Apple & Google) do not compete a lot on the desktop applications software market.

  IMHO it may be even easier in desktop market than in the high competing mobile market where people want everything for free or at very low price. TL;DR Desktop will not die and there will never be a time were you can say "Everything is done".

• by crispytx on 5/23/16, 8:24 AM

  At the mortgage company I worked at after college, the entire company was using "command line style" "ms-dos" looking software that ran the entire company. This software completely dominates the entire mortgage market! Makes some boring ass mortgage software with a GUI and some bug fixes and you might make yourself a millionaire. And the software was not "rock solid". It had all kinds of bugs that screwed up customers accounts and cost them $$$. The only reason companies use shit like that is because it beats running the company manually without a computer. So anyway, go out there and write yourself some boring business process software!

• by kowdermeister on 5/22/16, 4:00 PM

  VR, AR, AI. Three two letter buzzwords. All of them have massive unexplored potential on the desktop.

  > It's actually shocking how difficult I'm finding it to answer this question.

  You are asking the wrong question, because you are looking at the existing market. You need to analyze trends, news and cutting edge science, have imagination, vision and forward thinking. That's obviously also hard, but it's not like looking for an empty field in the forest where you want to plant your trees.

  You might find "Blue ocean strategy" a good book.

• by tlrobinson on 5/22/16, 3:47 PM

  This is a bit like asking "Have all good books already been written?"

  Maybe all the trivial/obvious/easy ones have but certainly not all the interesting ones.

• by intAligned on 5/22/16, 11:04 PM

  Sketch actually arrived in a period when the vector / pixel drawing tool space was pretty filled up by giants like illustrator and photoshop. They still hold the "best software in da place" title. But, Sketch found its niche by offering a mixed, self-contained solution. The point is, first, distinction: while Adobe brought real innovation, Sketch somewhat aggregated functionality. Today, there are new fields opening (AI suffices to keep the thread open for ages). So it's actually safe to say that there will be a) space for primary innovation applications and b) space for aggregators, re-configurators of selected functionality looking for niche functionality (very much like Coda, today totally disrupted, did with web development tools ~ 5 years ago). Just look at Sublime and Atom. Even Coda.. wasn't it Vim with some fancy ftp plugin and tree plugin?

• by newtype on 5/22/16, 3:49 PM

  I am doing just that. A hugely ambitious project, with a very wide potential user base, but I have lost all hope in finding funding at a reasonable rate. I am consulting during the day to pay for what I need, and working on the product at night.

• by msvan on 5/22/16, 4:01 PM

  Any space that lacks competitors is probably lacking competitors because there's no money in it, or because it takes a huge amount of work. The bar is high, but we're certainly not "done" with desktop software. For example, if you can create a text editor that's as snappy as Sublime and as extensible as Atom, you have my money.

• by IgorPartola on 5/22/16, 3:38 PM

  I don't think that having existing software is a bad thing. There were loads of DVD ripping packages, but at some point Handbrake came out and was better than the rest. There were loads of screenshoting tools, but at some point Monosnap came out and set the bar high.

  Inventing and implementing soothing that is both compelling and has never been done before is really tough. How about instead improving on an existing idea that has not been implemented well?

• by Lordarminius on 5/23/16, 9:46 AM

  Great topic!

  Short answer: 'No'

  The idea of software development for the desktop is one of the reasons why I got into learning to code in the first place.

  FWIW I think a developer should look outside the tech community (and I define tech loosely to include artists,illustrators and such.) There are, as has been pointed out, many industries that are neglected,pharma,finance(!),education,religion,home-users. In addition I think it is useful to turn ones attention from the West to huge swathes of territory and consumers that remain unconquered in Africa, Asia, Latin America. Even within North America many niches exist. Last year an I almost struck up a partnership with a North American pharmacist who had an idea for a desktop application that would aid in reviewing patients. Turns out that the pharmacy review process for patients is ripe for 'digitization'. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations showed a potential income in the millions of dollars if we captured just 10% of the market (sadly the partnership did not work out.) I am currently working on a CRM(!of all things) desktop/mobile app for use in an under served market. I strongly feel that many such niches still exist. But you have to look deeply beyond current customers and traditional markets.

• by Alex3917 on 5/22/16, 3:28 PM

  There are no good fieldguides to plants/trees/fungi for either desktop or mobile. (I think I've purchased every single one for iOS.)

• by gaze on 5/23/16, 2:24 AM

  I don't really understand why people are writing off the desktop in general. For engineering and design and lab software nobody wants tablets. I guess this is all niche but it's a big niche.

  Do I really want my next finite element analysis package or pattern design software or whatever running on a tablet? Maybe if the tablet is the size of my table or at least as big as all my monitors put together. This category of software is in general a bit crappy since professionals in these fields tend to just accept the flaws of the software and work around them and they just become part of the practice of the field if the software is sufficiently popular.

• by LarryMade2 on 5/23/16, 3:21 AM

  I would say not all the desktop apps have been 'rewritten' lately. The evolution of the desktop many, many great apps for years and decades past have been obsoleted sometimes the software was way ahead of the hardware.

  If you aren't finding anything interesting that is unwritten, you might take a trip down history and see what things had been abandoned on the wayside fro one reason or other, that might be time for a refresh.

  As far as new platforms - I think augmented reality (such as google glass, hololens) is going to be a new desktop metaphor and see a lot of "wheel reinvention" in the coming years as the platforms become stable.

• by dfex on 5/23/16, 10:42 AM

  "Can you think of any worthwhile/interesting software that is desktop-specific (Windows/Linux/Mac) and that does not already have in-production offerings by at least two competing teams?"

  I would say Microsoft Visio on Windows, and Omnigraffle on Mac OS X would be good examples. Both software packages that command a premium price, have virtually no competition on their respective platforms and are very specific to the Desktop.

  While writing a clone of either might not be a license to print money, perhaps focussing on a diagramming tool specific to a niche market might be interesting?

• by hodgesrm on 5/22/16, 4:04 PM

  I am curious why you are asking the question this way. I would ask what are the most interesting new markets for software. Then you can see if desktop software seems a relevant part of the solution.

• by erehweb on 5/22/16, 3:54 PM

  There is a need for something that makes it easy to build and display pivot tables on the web. Tableau attempts to fill this, but it is not as easy and does not have as much functionality as Excel.

• by detaro on 5/22/16, 3:53 PM

  > Ten years ago you could have said anything from money management software, to code editors, vector image editors, remote storage, news readers

  Then years ago there almost certainly where more than two options for most of these categories, at least for windows and Mac. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a market for competitors if they can offer something new.

  Sketch seems like a perfect example: there already were tons of design packages before, but they found a niche that wasn't covered well and made a product fitting it perfectly. Despite Photoshop being the "king" of image editing software for over a decade there still are commercial competitors around. Despite google maps & co there still are desktop mapping packages targeting private users, not to mention commercial users. They probably are not the most profitable software products, but they are around for years and get updated, so their makers think it is worthwhile.

  A common thread seems to be that these are professional or enthusiast tools, where user stickiness is higher, and that they either have unique features that are unlikely to be replicated elsewhere or that they offer a cheaper alternative to established professional tools. Also harder to be replaced by mobile or web options.

  Regional markets can be another thing, where global companies often only offer sub-par or way to expensive options.

  The biggest issue I see for "studios" is having to find good niches repeatedly to maintain headcount, because maintenance on a product often needs less developers than getting it off the ground, and in many markets you can't sell a new version every year.

• by open-source-ux on 5/22/16, 5:32 PM

  I can't think of any serious competitor to Adobe After Effects. There are many apps that partially overlap e.g. Fusion, or 3D apps like Cinema 4D. Apple's Motion 5 (the latest version) was released in 2011 and is not considered a serious competitor.

  Another example is InDesign. There are other DTP apps available, but for professional publication design, InDesign is the leading DTP program.

  What Adobe has is "mindshare" amongst designers (and a wealth of tutorials, brushes, scripts, plugins, presets etc).

  But there are encouraging signs that some users are considering alternatives. Sketch (Mac only) is a suitable alternative to Illustrator for many (if not all) tasks. So is Affinity Designer (Mac only too, but a Windows version is in the works). Affinity Photo (Mac only again) is an alternative to Photoshop.

  Plus, there are actually a wide number of digital painting apps for both Windows and Mac (e.g. Painter, Clip Studio, ArtRage, SketchBook Pro etc).

  Like other posters have said, there is plenty of scope for new desktop apps to rival old established apps. So much existing software has poor UX. If you can develop a better UI and a better or easier method of accomplishing tasks, people will take an interest. Both Sketch and Affinity Designer/Photo have enjoyed a swell of enthusiastic users who champion those programs. Much of their success is precisely because they offer a different/quicker/easier/more comfortable way of performing tasks than the clunky, cumbersome UIs of their Adobe rivals.

  I'd hate to think that someone would give up on a desktop app because they think the desktop space is too established or settled. You might not topple your rivals, but you can certainly carve out a profitable niche.

• by shanehoban on 5/23/16, 10:47 AM

  Has all the interesting art already been created?

  There is likely enough art to keep any one person entertained for a lifetime, sure.

  In the case of software, there is likely enough desktop software to keep users content for their lifetime use of computing too - but that doesn't mean that all useful/interesting art or desktop software has been created, or written.

  The question is rather of necessity rather than interesting I think.

• by brightball on 5/24/16, 8:24 PM

  Remember, build a better mousetrap. Don't avoid mousetraps because somebody already made one.

• by hyperpallium on 5/22/16, 4:34 PM

  > money management software, to code editors, vector image editors, remote storage, news readers

  Is that really true? e.g. for code editors: vim, emacs and several IDEs.

  There's usually only a very brief period between when an idea gets maket validation, and competitors appear.

  In effect, your question asks us to predict the next successful idea, before it's successful.

  That said, creative people tend to be attracted to newer platforms - web, mobile - which generally have more user convenience and features than desktop apps, and are "powerful enough" these days.

  Something that requires even more power - simulation, VR, games - and/or requires keyboard and mouse could win on desktop.

• by charlesism on 5/22/16, 3:57 PM

  All the interesting cutlery has also already been made, but people still design new forks and knives. It would be pretty unpleasant if there were only two fork manufacturers in existence.

• by tyingq on 5/22/16, 5:11 PM

  You might have better luck looking into a small business niche. If you can find the right launch customer, software for small businesses can be lucrative. Orthodontists, pawn shops, dry cleaners, pack-and-mail, etc. A good launch customer would have enough info to let you know if there's a price or feature gap you could exploit. Then, a follow-on appearance at a trade show (even with a faked up mock-up app) would let you gauge interest level.

• by selamtux on 5/22/16, 4:26 PM

  You can delevop new softwares like cloud management (aws or/and google compute engine) or really working docker management ui, or something similar.

  Or flash to html5 converter (convert all games example)

  So you have keep eye on technical changes around the world.

  Also softwares reaaly depending local env. Yes maybe photoshop or ms office is big products bu these is lot of local area to develop new apps. (When i said local think as countrys) for doing that you must travel the world.

• by kennywinker on 5/22/16, 3:50 PM

  Someone might very well have said exactly this five years ago. One of your examples, Sketch, has only existed since 2010. In five years time there will probably be some widely known app that didn't exist today.

  What are the design and creation tools for augmented reality? Or chatbots or whatever. There will be new niches created, and new ways of doing old tasks discovered.

• by visakanv on 5/22/16, 3:55 PM

  I'm still always wishing that there would be some really good way to manage my information/media consumption in a simple, centralized way. I find Pocket unsatisfactory. I'm talking particularly about books, videos (movies, youtube vids, netflix series, etc) and news articles online. My current system is ridiculously scattered.

• by reitanqild on 5/22/16, 5:17 PM

  One thing I would love to find as commercially friendly open source or want to buy or for up to $2 pr license is basically a single-site-browser creation kit (like mozilla prism) only with a few more added bells and whistles like quake-like slide-in, configurable window borders etc.

• by avmich on 5/22/16, 4:20 PM

  There is a systematic, though still hard in practice, approach to answering this question. You can enumerate what software could possibly be needed, as automation tools for what tasks can possibly be required to complete and methods which are available for them.

• by swah on 5/23/16, 3:38 PM

  No, everything is up for replacement. How/when are we going to replace web browsers (and tech) we're currently using?

• by somberi on 5/23/16, 4:57 AM

  Have all the interesting paintings been painted?

• by beachstartup on 5/22/16, 3:27 PM

  make an app that works exactly like Stickies.app, except shows up exactly the same on all of your devices. I'd pay about 20 bucks for that.

• by cloudjacker on 5/23/16, 6:38 AM

  No, the Monero GUI has been in development for two years and its almost done!

  I'm being partially sarcastic

• by rubenolivares on 5/22/16, 4:13 PM

  The answer to this is a resounding NO.

  Browser graphics is in the stone age compared to Desktop graphics. And that's just to name one thing.

• by protomyth on 5/22/16, 4:27 PM

  Have all the great songs been written? I get the feeling the answer is the same probably for similar reasons.

  I honestly think it was easier for me (located in ND / MN) to find good pop bands in the UK in the 90's than finding good software now. There is so much noise and I cannot easily keep track of what people I follow on various networks are using. We have a huge amount of information, but search just doesn't work anymore and the filters on various networks are horrible. I get the feeling the ad model is to blame.