> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.
Never seen that happen. Software that exists with no one to sell it just doesn't get sold.
On the other hand, a salesman with nothing to sell is Bill Gates when he signed on to provide MS DOS for IBM.
In fact, if you look over the history of this industry, success has, with few exceptions, always been sales-first, then development effort.
It's why we prioritise MVP: do the minimum necessary that we can sell, so that the dev effort is not wasted. At it's core, MVP would involve absolutely no development at all.
Is this just a difference of perspective? Seems like GP's point was that software has latent value, and differentiation, and the act of selling is commodifiable.
Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?
I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.
> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.
I would argue that software that exists with no one to sell it is actually MUCH less valuable than a salesman with nothing to sell, because someone has poured countless hours of blood, sweat and tears into that code, and without a salesperson that developer will receive a terrible return on their investment.
A salesperson with nothing to sell on the other hand is simply a salesperson looking for a job. They have not expended the hours creating a product that will never sell.
Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it. The salesperson hasn’t demonstrated they can sell and has nothing of value other than their potential; just like all the other salespeople looking for jobs. A pretty easy class of people to join.
> Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it.
How is "the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it" relevant?
When a developer spends time on code that no one ever pays money for, whoever is employing that developer has lost money, probably a lot of it.
When a salesperson sits at home unemployed, it costs the company who will eventually employ them nothing.
How in the world are you trying to claim a sunken cost fallacy in this case? Did you respond to the wrong post? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Unless you are just trying to grift people, which a disappointingly large percentage of the tech/Silicon Valley/startup crowd are totally cool with.