It's not about selfishness, it's just that most easy problems got solved, and we're left with really really hard ones.
Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own.
Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and pretty much guaranteed to get nowhere.
Or, just throwing this out there as an option, you could solve any problem for a physician's practice -- like, say, patients not complying with their treatment regimen by failing to make scheduled check ups. You might even be able to do that with a SaaS app.
Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available to spend.)
Patrick you've put yourself in a relatively unusual position of being both a full-stack software developer / marketer and actually knowing the market.
It's struck me that part of the reason people don't try to solve these types of problems because they just don't know the market at all. They solve problems they have exposure to.
Knowing what you know, do you think there's any scope for a "Meet the Market" mini-conference where people with actual problems (and budget) from, say, medecine come along and give a lecture on what problems they'd pay to have solved? Do you think that purchasers have enough knowledge about their own problems that they could verbalise them such that people could help solve them?
I think Patric has the point about going and solving real problems AND making money in the process. A miniconference is the lazy route because you are going to see needs filtered through someone else's point of view. If you are going to develope a product it has to be from your point of view and the needs you feel are uncovered.
I've been working in a market that is not going to change the word, but it's very far from my expertice field. I'll say that sometimes "experts" are so entrenched on the existing conditions(or they have too much to risk) that you need a child yelling that the king is naked, to bring light into the room.
To find problems to solve, you only need to walk with your eyes open, and listen when people talk. There are so many broken processes out there that it's overwelming.
Great point, but the government seems to be hell-bent on making this impossible through laws like HIPAA, so while it may indeed be possible to make, the government is going to fight against you every single step of the way.
HIPAA is almost the perfect example of pg's schlep blindness thesis. (See article of same name.)
Is it annoying? Yes. Does it add cost and complexity? Yes. Are any of the requirements of dubious to nil security value in many cases? Yes. (+)
But HIPAA is not a barrier like "create a meaningful application from nothing" or "successfully navigate an enterprise sales purchasing process" is a barrier. After you've got a handle on what it asks you to do it is really anticlimactic.
+ I am required to have a document which explicitly states that I will discipline myself most severely for misuse of patient information. No joke.
Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate."
Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."
The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12 billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.
The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end of the day....
All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.
Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here quite recently about the awful 911 system.
You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
The not-so-subtle subtext was that "I, erm, actually sell software which does pretty much exactly this." The how, in relevant fashion: create software which does appointment reminding phone calls for, without loss of generality, HVAC contractors. Read up on HIPAA requirements and talk to people who've done it before. Do some very boring paperwork and not-all-that-impressive technical work for ticking off the boxes. Start landing hospital clients, through a combination of slackadaiscal meat-and-potatoes SEO and being a lot more hungry for their business at the low end than the competition is.
I don't typically compete in or win two year bid cycles. I go after smaller projects in the $X,000 to $X0,000 a year range. The sales process often involves convincing a single nurse or office manager that I'm not some slick sales guy from the big city who is going to sell her $10,000 of software where she needs $2,000 and then never be there for her if it breaks.
Your mileage (kilometerage?) may vary in the United Kingdom.
The company I work for does exactly this actually, and there are others like us. The problem is that due to heavy regulations/HIPAA, we have to sell our services to companies who can use it with their provided insurance.
You can't just set up a service with a Facebook log in and have people connecting medical information, so it's not something that's going to end up getting viral or posted on blogs or TechCrunch, and the only people that are going to see your service are the ones that work for our clients.
I can't even put 99% of what I do on a regular basis into a portfolio or anything because of these regulations.
I guess my point is there _are_ companies doing things like this, while being successful and social conscious, they just won't be publicized like Angry Birds or the Find-Vegan-Bacon-In-SF-Apps.
Yes, there are a lot of outstanding problems with simple solutions that aren't hard in any practical way. The problem is that we want (I want?) headline-making accomplishment and intellectual gratification.
In the 80's, 90's and into the 00's, we fleshed out a lot of the tough-but-solvable pieces of the puzzle. Now we're left with either very easy pieces (local events, photo sharing, Angry Birds, ...) or the problems that stumped everyone (Semantic Web).
The hard problems do have a few crazy people attempting them, but they get very little support -- as opposed to support and often funding for an app that lets you share your cat pictures.
And I think that's why we're in a lull. HN itself has become boring. (Have you noticed?) Without the crazy research kamikazes, we aren't going anywhere.
Not picking you out specifically, just this post caught my eye.
We have (essentially) cured certain types of cancer. Testicular for men, skin melanoma in general, Hodgkin's lymphoma in young people. We are making tons of progress in cancer research, and we are making tons of difference in both quality of life, length of life, and survivability. Heck, my mother died of cancer, one with bad statistics, but it was almost entirely painless, and the treatment was by and large not horrible. That wouldn't have been true just a few decades ago.
"We"? Some cancers have been cured, not by programmers, but by huge well funded teams of researches - biologists, chemists, administrators, lab technicians, interns, etc.
Sure, you could join such a team and possibly end up being a part of the cancer cure, if you're lucky.
That's quite different from what we see with solo projects and startups.
Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own.
Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and pretty much guaranteed to get nowhere.