These kind of no-code or low-code tools are VERY common in enterprise, like SAP, Salesforce, CMS solutions, IBM Tivoli products, and on and on. But companies are starting to realise that those tools often have some hard limits on what you can do and the problems they are solving get so complex that hacking the tool around to solve the problem becomes unsustainable. If anything even enterprise companies are pivoting away from this kind of tool towards custom-built software.
I call it the "army of consultants problem", sure you can use a low/no-code tool, but if your problem is complex or big enough you will eventually need an army of consultants specialised in said tool to maintain your solution and you will be limited by what the tool can do. Eventually you get to that point it becomes more expensive than just building custom, but by then your company is too invested in the tool and only a band-aid ripping can fix it. Most often than not ripping it out would kill the company/product if it happens too late. Thing is, the tools give the impression they are cheaper because you get a lot "out of the box", while a custom-built tool takes a long time to do anything useful
Reminds me an article I read once, it was about why My Space failed, it propositioned that the main reason was that they were using Dreamweaver and their product was so big and complex that the devs could no longer handle the complexity to add new features or fix performance problems. And the company as an organisation could not find enough dreamweaver devs because they needed an army of them
One of the main triggers for this is cloud infrastructure is so much better and cheaper today that a single developer can orchestrate a really complex system of services and servers in a few hours if he knows what he is doing. So the industry as a whole is shifting from "army of low skill specialised devs" to "low amount of highly skilled generalist devs". You can see it in the job openings, nobody wants to hire low-level anymore, or if they do it is to support legacy systems
of course it is a balancing act, plenty of companies use no-code or low-code tools for limited small-scale uses. Classic one is CMS, few companies have legitimate reasons to build their own custom CMS instead of using a SaaS one. You need to be at a scale where you have so much content written/managed by so many people that it makes sense to do custom. Or have exoteric types of content
It reminds me of a guy I interviewed who worked at a fashion brand as a software engineer, his job was to build a custom system to automate fitting photos of clothes to photos of people to put in the e-commerce site. Previously they did it manually with photoshop, but they needed an army of photoshop guys to do it. His solution was custom to the needs of the company (ie only the poses they needed), a generic SaaS solution, if it existed, would have probably been too complex to use or maintain
In general the Joel rule applies: "If it is core to your business, you want to do it in-house". Although I can think of a few exceptions, like payment/subscription flows for e-commerce. But heck I bet Amazon has their own custom payment/subscription systems for each market
Comments
These kind of no-code or low-code tools are VERY common in enterprise, like SAP, Salesforce, CMS solutions, IBM Tivoli products, and on and on. But companies are starting to realise that those tools often have some hard limits on what you can do and the problems they are solving get so complex that hacking the tool around to solve the problem becomes unsustainable. If anything even enterprise companies are pivoting away from this kind of tool towards custom-built software.
I call it the "army of consultants problem", sure you can use a low/no-code tool, but if your problem is complex or big enough you will eventually need an army of consultants specialised in said tool to maintain your solution and you will be limited by what the tool can do. Eventually you get to that point it becomes more expensive than just building custom, but by then your company is too invested in the tool and only a band-aid ripping can fix it. Most often than not ripping it out would kill the company/product if it happens too late. Thing is, the tools give the impression they are cheaper because you get a lot "out of the box", while a custom-built tool takes a long time to do anything useful
Reminds me an article I read once, it was about why My Space failed, it propositioned that the main reason was that they were using Dreamweaver and their product was so big and complex that the devs could no longer handle the complexity to add new features or fix performance problems. And the company as an organisation could not find enough dreamweaver devs because they needed an army of them
One of the main triggers for this is cloud infrastructure is so much better and cheaper today that a single developer can orchestrate a really complex system of services and servers in a few hours if he knows what he is doing. So the industry as a whole is shifting from "army of low skill specialised devs" to "low amount of highly skilled generalist devs". You can see it in the job openings, nobody wants to hire low-level anymore, or if they do it is to support legacy systems
of course it is a balancing act, plenty of companies use no-code or low-code tools for limited small-scale uses. Classic one is CMS, few companies have legitimate reasons to build their own custom CMS instead of using a SaaS one. You need to be at a scale where you have so much content written/managed by so many people that it makes sense to do custom. Or have exoteric types of content
It reminds me of a guy I interviewed who worked at a fashion brand as a software engineer, his job was to build a custom system to automate fitting photos of clothes to photos of people to put in the e-commerce site. Previously they did it manually with photoshop, but they needed an army of photoshop guys to do it. His solution was custom to the needs of the company (ie only the poses they needed), a generic SaaS solution, if it existed, would have probably been too complex to use or maintain
In general the Joel rule applies: "If it is core to your business, you want to do it in-house". Although I can think of a few exceptions, like payment/subscription flows for e-commerce. But heck I bet Amazon has their own custom payment/subscription systems for each market