I think you're getting the idea -- both your points kinda highlight that this is something that companies want, but are not really getting.

As for the market, various sources have the "enterprise software market", whatever that means, at somewhere around $100 billion to $300 billion. We also see companies trying over and over to do this kind of thing. The demand is clearly there.

Certainly the mandate "help run the business" is a wide concern, and that's an OK working definition of "enterprise", and what most existing solutions are trying to do. There are hundreds of interconnected concerns, lots of things to coordinate, etc.

There are other wide concerns, though. Almost anything in engineering and science. Take, for example, the question "how can we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?" which a lot of companies are asking (or being forced to ask). If you wanted to build a SAAS product for helping companies reduce their GHG, you've got a wide problem, because there are a thousand activities that can emit GHG, and any given company is going to be doing dozens of them at once. But each company is different. Each state and country thinks of things differently. You might not even have the same calculations state-to-state.

Hard problems in science and engineering are just naturally cross-disciplinary, meaning your system has to know a lot of things about a lot of subjects. There are just thousands of little complicating differences and factors. If you're trying to solve a problem like this, absolutely do not de-normalize your database.

Lotus notes is wide… I imagine their scope creep checker was just a sticky note that said Absolutely!!

I miss notes - it was really a better way to organize companies than anything later. Historical valuable data, records of why decisions were made, ephemeral email like things but for groups, user programmable if it didn't quite match your needs, robust encryption, it had it all.

oh I always nust assumed Lotus Notes was just lesser Outlook. can you give examples - such has how did it capture why decisions were made - that sounds ... hard or just "someone wrote it down"

It was a low/nocode environment; anyone (with enough rights) could knock up a simple app with rules/workflows and share it with the company. It made collecting, distributing and organising information easy if you knew what you were doing. It also created complex monsters as it was both too easy and too hard to use. I liked it a lot; we moved from Notes to Exchange and Sharepoint back in the day and it was awful for effiency. We required so much more people to do the same things. Luckily I left shortly after.

Oh.

I struggle with the value of low/no code vs learning to code and providing common libraries.

For your company you have a lot of smart people other than coders. And Notes had a rich collaborative set of intrinsically that you could hip out work flow applications like an accountant with spreadsheets. And built in security and auditing and all that. And since you had the ability to craft tools to fit the exact situation, automation of processes went so fast and was done by people familiar with the business side of the process. We did have a Notes team that would do apps for teams that couldn’t but also had a rich ecosystem of business line apps that were so much better than spreadsheet apps or Access apps.

Facebook was done by Zuckerberg without any specialized knowledge and people would like to go that route because it seems easier, making Twitter/FB/Instagram clone you don't really have to know anything about insurances or handling industrial waste. Then it is basically people joining based on other people

Nowadays there are bunch of regulations on handling user data that one cannot do without knowing but when these companies started that was not an issue.

My point is market for "wide" applications is huge but it is much more fragmented. Of Course SAP and Salesforce are taking cut in that by having "one app for everything"

To get contracts you have to have specialized knowledge in specific area that your SaaS app would provide more value than configuring some crappy version in SAP. So you cannot just make an app in your basement and watch people sign up, but you have to spend a lot of leg work getting customers. That is why it is not really "hot" area for startups, because there is a lot of good money there but not unicorn money and most likely you won't be able to have 2 or 3 different specialist niche products so you could diversify investment but you would have to commit to a niche which makes it also not really interesting for a lot of entrepreneurs who most likely would lie to jump to something more profitable when possible.

> What is the market for "wide" applications though?

Just my experience, but essentially these target industries, not necessarily consumers or singular entities. Hence the term "enterprise". As someone who worked on a fairly reasonable ERP for academic purposes, even just calculating a GPA is extremely complicated in the backend:

    * There are multiple schemes for calculating GPAs
    * Each scheme needs to support multiple grading types (A-F, pass/fail, etc)
    * Each scheme needs to support multiple rounding rules
    * Displays of GPAs will need to be scaled properly based on the output context
    * GPA values will need to be normalized for use in calculations in other parts of the system
    * State legislatures mandate state-specific usages of GPAs which must be honored for legal compliance
    * All GPA calculations must have historical context in case the rules changes so that old transcripts can be revived correctly
    * Institutions themselves will have custom rules (maybe across schools or departments) for calculations which must be incorporated into everything else
    * This pretty much has to work every time

I don't know exactly how many tables GPAs themselves took, but overall the system was over 4,000 tables and 10,000+ stored procedures/functions. Also, I worked in the State of Texas which has its own institution-supported entity performing customizations to this ERP for multiple universities that are installed separately but required for full compliant operation.

I would compare this to most modern "tall" applications which would more-than-likely offer you maybe up to 3 different GPA options with some basic data syncing or something. They might offer multiple rounding types if they thought that far. These apps are generally extremely niche and typically work for very basic workloads. They can capture a lot of easy value for entry-level stuff but immediately fail at everything else.