I have a friend who sold his company many years ago for about $20 million. He had developed one product. It was based on a set of off-the-shelf Z80 STD cards in a frame along with a few custom cards. The software running the system was written entirely in Forth. No OS, just finely-tuned Forth from the ground up. No graphical interface either. The thing was operated via a terminal over RS-232 or RS-422.
So, yeah, lots of very lucrative niches out there in industrial, medical, defense and other markets that have nothing whatsoever to do with creating websites or mobile apps. You just have to find them and jump on them. I've been lucky enough to hook a couple of those over the years, though not as "juicy" as the niche my friend found.
I wonder if the 'net and mobile craze is creating a situation where CS grads are coming out of school having nearly no idea that there are very interesting worlds out there that lie outside of those domains?
It isn't necessarily about being in "hard" industries. Frankly, sometimes it is about just about the proverbial right-place-right-time effect while having the drive (and the balls) to jump into a problem face-first after having identified it. That was the case for my friend and my own experiences. He saw a problem and dove right into it at the expense of everything else. He didn't know how big this thing could be when he launched into it. He developed a good solution and it turned out to be a hit.
In my case I've had weird things come across my table. Some have been total wastes of time. Some have been extremely lucrative. For example, I was asked to build a protocol translator that would receive commands over RS-232 and convert them to a different protocol out of a second RS-232 port and do this bidirectionally. I thought it was a one-off. I built it out of mostly existing hardware and sold it to the company that contracted me to do this for $3,000. Then they came back and ordered another 30 at the same price. My COGS was probably no more than $200. Imagine my surprise.
There are many areas of industry ripe for disruption. Some harder than others for various reasons. This is why I think it is important to be exposed to a lot of corners of the tech world. I'd like to say that I planned what I did, but that would not be true. I was fortunate enough to bounce around a number of areas and learned from all of it.
Take, for example, the CNC industry. After cobbling-up a number of DIY CNC machines I decided to spend my time on what I was actually trying to build rather than getting derailed making "amateur" manufacturing equipment. So, I leased my first Haas VF-6SS vertical machining center. I didn't know the first thing about running such a machine. I kind of knew G-code, but not really. Things are far more serious when you have a 20HP spindle and a table that can move so fast it's scary. Anyhow, after getting up to speed on the technology and being very comfortable writing G-code as well as developing models on Solidworks and programming the machine using CAM software it became very obvious that this industry is ripe for serious disruption. I won't go into all the details here. If you don't have the context of having run these kinds of systems it just won't make sense anyway. Let's just say that they are still in the stone age and it would be fantastic to see someone bring them out of the cave. Tough industry to crack. Lots of crusty non-tech people to sell to.
> I wonder if the 'net and mobile craze is creating a situation where CS grads are coming out of school having nearly no idea that there are very interesting worlds out there that lie outside of those domains?
I don't think so. I think its just making the world more accessible to people who normally wouldn't have entered.
I myself was always interested in CS / Programming, but never had the discipline to learn it. Web stuff got me involved later in life, and now having the discipline, I"m slowly working my way down (as it were..). I think those niche's become apparent to people who, being interested in the subjects, just keep digging.
If you know this, why is he bothering to say that he declines to give information about what he's accomplished? Why explicitly claim something's a secret if it isn't actually secret anymore?
Is it really so hard to understand that there are projects people don't like or can discuss in public?
This does not mean that it's not public knowledge that lots of people have made substantial amounts of money on software written in assembler. Most games written in the 80's for example. Lots and lots of business software written in the 80's and before.
There's nothing unusual about that.
And lots of software people won't want to or be able to talk about in public.
