Ask HN: What's the greatest piece of non-dogfooded software?

9•nathancspencer•7mo ago

It seems like every "great" piece of software, e.g. the operating systems of Apple and Microsoft, the search engine of Google, AWS inside Amazon, Facebook etc was dogfooded.

What's the biggest exception to this rule?

Comments

abc000•7mo ago

None.

defrost•7mo ago

The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (DDSACCS), which sends emergency action messages to nuclear forces.

Not entirely software .. but an example of a system not used in house .. or at all ... yet.

Greatest? Hmm. Hard to say.

muzani•7mo ago

Nuclear deterrence means that a nation can counter while/after being nuked, and it has to demonstrate this capacity confidently enough to deter any country that would nuke them.

It would be an amazing system. Cut the head off and up to 20% of the world is dead or injured, followed by the socioeconomic collapse due to destruction at this scale.

d--b•7mo ago

Well software for non-software people...

Like I doubt that people writing autoCAD are ones who needed it in the first place.

Maybe I am wrong.

JohnFen•7mo ago

I don't think you're wrong. Most of my career has been working on specialty software that no individual (including myself) could use, and therefore can't be dogfooded.

matt_s•7mo ago

Do companies like Oracle and SAP run their own business on their ERP platforms? That might be the biggest one.

thorin•7mo ago

I'm pretty sure they do, but quite a few parts of the Oracle applications suite are acquired so probably not those. I'm sure sap would use sap erp, from what I've seen almost all big European companies use sap for payroll.

aristofun•7mo ago

How is facebook dogfooded? Do they buy facebook ads?

And wasn’t windows originally created as a product for sale? I don’t remember microsoft starting as hardware company. Maybe that is why windows sucks :)

LarryMade2•7mo ago

I think there are probably some out there, likely would have started out as a niche contract job (like say fast food POS systems) and have built up from there. Though its really hard to make something like that "great" unless you hire experts from that field to help develop them.

yamatokaneko•7mo ago

The first company that came to mind is Unity. Epic has Unreal and actively dogfoods it by developing Fortnite. But Unity doesn’t really have a flagship product like that, right? I'm sure they use it internally to build sample games, but nothing at AAA scale?

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