To be honest, while the author's depiction of academic publishing is mostly not wrong, they make it sound much worse than it actually is. Folk knowledge is a thing, but papers do contain most of the valuable knowledge if you know how to read them.
I think 95% of this person's failure to monetize their product comes from trying to sell it to an audience that is just quite broke, and the rest is probably mostly post hoc rationalization. Not only grad students and postdoc wages are low, in many countries (not the US) professors aren't well paid either (and buying software subscriptions from grant funds is often not allowed or difficult due to crazy bureaucracy).
As a full professor myself, I almost don't buy software for work. I suffer the torture of Microsoft Office, which my institution is subscribed to, I'm subscribed to Overleaf with grant money (for now, but I might be forced to cancel depending on how the funding goes) and I pay for ChatGPT out of pocket because trying to use grant money for that is bureaucratic hell. That's all. It would take a really transformative piece of software for me to subscribe to something else.
Quite a lot of things. A (probably non-exhaustive, off the top of my head) of things where it saves me the most time:
- Bureaucracy. Writing silly boilerplate, e.g. data management plans or gender perspective statements in grant proposals.
- Cutting or expanding text (we routinely have lots of forms and submissions where you need to write a text in a given word or character range).
- Polite emails in English to people I don't know much (e.g. "Write a polite professional email reminding this person that the deadline for reviewing paper Y expired yesterday...")
- Brainstorming. "Give me 10 ideas about research direction in topic X". It won't give great ideas, but it's good to set the mind rolling.
- Routine scripts/code used in experiments and papers: write a Python script to make a box plot with such and such data, or to take a file in this format and strip this unneeded content, etc. The typical kind of code that appears a lot in research, is trivial to code but consumes time and ChatGPT does it in seconds.
- Suggest titles (paper titles, grant proposal titles, etc.).
- Suggest ideas for exercises or exam questions (e.g. write an assignment that can be solved with the coin change algorithm but involves no coins or currency).
- How to do X in Excel (although the problem here is that my Excel is in Spanish - why, why did they decide to translate function names? - and it's not that good at that - but anyway, it's very useful).
The productivity boost is very noticeable, well worth the cost, even if it hurts to pay out of pocket for a tool used at work.
To be honest, while the author's depiction of academic publishing is mostly not wrong, they make it sound much worse than it actually is. Folk knowledge is a thing, but papers do contain most of the valuable knowledge if you know how to read them.
I think 95% of this person's failure to monetize their product comes from trying to sell it to an audience that is just quite broke, and the rest is probably mostly post hoc rationalization. Not only grad students and postdoc wages are low, in many countries (not the US) professors aren't well paid either (and buying software subscriptions from grant funds is often not allowed or difficult due to crazy bureaucracy).
As a full professor myself, I almost don't buy software for work. I suffer the torture of Microsoft Office, which my institution is subscribed to, I'm subscribed to Overleaf with grant money (for now, but I might be forced to cancel depending on how the funding goes) and I pay for ChatGPT out of pocket because trying to use grant money for that is bureaucratic hell. That's all. It would take a really transformative piece of software for me to subscribe to something else.