preface
My initial concept of low code comes from what others ask me or output to me in interviews. However, as MY understanding of low code gets deeper and deeper, I find that the understanding of low code in domestic business and technical circles (including myself before) is somewhat problematic.
The body of the
What is low code
According to the product translation of outSystems in China, low code is a way to develop software with little or no code. Around this way, outSystems has launched a series of products to help enterprises accomplish the work needed for digital transformation. About outSystems, It was founded in 2001, but only recently discovered by the investment community. Unlike unicorns in general, it is a mature software company, but the commercial use of low code has helped it leapfrog the original growth curve. Just like there might not be Java without Sun, there might not be the concept of low code without outSystems, or something else, in a nutshell, right
Low code is a term for the use of low barrier coding to accomplish software development
So you just can achieve this goal, you can call themselves low code, so common a consensus now, from the development of the drag-and-drop mostly because at present for low code, drag-and-drop development mode is a kind of interactive experience better and costs are relatively low, but that’s about it, is not to say that the low code can only use the drag-and-drop method.
Low code motivation and development background
If a thousand years ago we wouldn’t have invented the light bulb or the steam engine, not just because the technology wasn’t there, but because of the context of the time, then why didn’t outSystems, a company that’s been around for 20 years, come out with a low-code product until recently? There is a very clear motive here. Because of the vigorous development of computer technology, global commercial companies have been unable to meet the software form of the information age, and the demand for enterprise digitization has been unable to be met
How to understand? I want to start with two words, information and digitization
The relationship between informatization and digitization
I wrote a personal reflection in my weekly newspaper last week, citing it to illustrate the relationship between the two words
I attended the technology summit organized by the company this week and derived some thoughts from some sharing, including informatization and digitization and low code.
I did not think deeply about the relationship between informatization and digitalization before, but simply thought that digitalization is the label of the new era, and informatization is the pronoun of the old. But as I thought about it myself over the weekend, there is actually a strong connection between the two.
Or to be more precise, informatization is people’s cognition of computer technology in the previous decades, including the introduction of the Internet into China, which is also known as the information superhighway. At that time, people’s cognition of the Internet and computer related technology such as software development was: This kind of technology can change the way we convey information, for enterprise services, the original print media to convey information can be replaced, which will depend on the print process all are joined by the software, especially the invention of the spreadsheet, further promoting the process of enterprise information of departments, Production data exchanged between factories and marketing departments, customer information, employee information, enterprise information collected by the government and so on are replaced by software on a large scale.
I understand that this process is a process in which people use electronic media to record information instead of paper media. Compared with paper media, electronic media is easier to store, search and calculate, and its efficiency is more than 10 times higher.
Thanks to the progress of informatization, many excellent software companies have been born in the field of enterprise services in western countries such as the United States and Europe. At the same time, such efficiency has also potentially affected the development speed of a country.
The birth of the Internet has changed this information carrier from the enterprise field to the people’s livelihood field, and people have transferred the paper media information in daily life to the Internet.
With the development of computer technology, this information substitution has been derived from print media to a richer field.
After the baptism of cloud computing, big data, block chain, Internet of Things and other new technologies, people find that the information collected and recorded by computer technology has far exceeded the content recorded by paper media in the past, such as digital agriculture, the record of crop growth environment and crop status. For example, we recognize faces through data collection, analyze user preferences, and even collect physiological data of people in the medical field
Obviously, the replacement of information carrier has gone far beyond the paper media defined in the information age, so we need a new definition, which I understand is digitalization.
In the digital age, people through technology are trying to convert everything we live in the real world into data, which can be recorded in the cloud for simulation, analysis and calculation.
It is foreseeable that this process will continue for decades or even centuries, and I believe that great software companies will emerge from the China-led digitalization process, just as informatization began several decades ago, to take a place in this great wave of innovation
And we came at the right time.
To put it simply, in the information age, enterprises focus on different contents, or lack sufficient imagination in their needs, so the software model is relatively fixed. With the software development way at that time, supply and demand can be satisfied.
However, in the digital age, the needs of enterprises far exceed their own content and become extremely complex and changeable. Coupled with the legacy of software in the information age, we have to carry out various customized development to provide services for customers. However, the cost of such development is very high. There are also not so many programmers in the software supply market to meet the needs of enterprises.
Let me give you a relatively graphic example, so you might understand it better.
Live with taobao, for example, for the popularity of the host jia-qi li, if there is no live broadcast technology, he will spend a lot of time on the study of commodity, if is offline form, users buy so much, if he spends a lot of energy to the goods, very professional experience for users, but at the same time can satisfy the user and there is only so much, Such inputs and outputs are clearly uneconomical. When the input-output is not cost-effective, what will we do, reduce the quality of service.
Another example is chain restaurants, we often find that those chain brands, the main store is often better taste, most of the branch can only call passable. The same is true here, that is, there will eventually be a balance between input and output and service quality.
What’s the best service? Personal service, customization, personalized service, service that only rich people can afford, so when no rich people are interested, it just doesn’t exist.
In the 2B field, customization is almost such a situation. The company that can afford it may not be willing to pay, and the company that cannot afford it is not worthy of investment. However, the company that only makes standardized products will not be accepted by customers. Definitely not willing to pay for it.
So now outSystems offers a great idea to 2B software companies, low code
Low code value
Technical value of low code
See low code of the company, not only to see his commercial value, in the circle of domestic technology, some big companies, senior engineers, the first thought is their own business scenarios, the wind suddenly revealed a low for this code, a lot of people who don’t think low code is a new technical term, is a kind of technology, Then do the past internal drag-and-drop development of low code on different platforms are crown, this drag-and-drop tools, often only when there is a market for large companies have a scene, some of the tuyere acute sense of entrepreneurs, especially in vc business oriented, it is also very quickly in the country have taken to low code development, this part we talk behind, Let’s talk about low code in the tech world
From a technical point of view, drag and drop development is nothing new, but in the past we did not have a definition of ranking, we colloquially, drag and drop, a page out. But there’s a big difference, and as I said above, drag and drop development is just a form of low code, and the point of low code is that the technical connotation of low is its technical value, including
- Lower development and maintenance costs for the same business
- Lower barriers to participation, which means, provide the possibility for all roles on the R&D link to work around the same platform
- Lower bug rate, this is easy to explain, with less manual code, there will be fewer bugs.
Low code business value
As mentioned above, what is the highest experience of the customer, that is, personal service, customization, you give him whatever he wants, God mode. From the client’s inner world, I must have done it right, must have not wasted a penny.
Then the traditional software development method is obviously unable to meet, if to meet the cost is uncontrollable, uncontrollable cost means uncontrollable quality of service. Eventually it will come back to that equilibrium.
But now there is a low code, all have the possibility, if I can in the internal process on the platform, low code that for external, for the customer, as the source of demand, also can let him directly involved, as long as the threshold is low enough, then from low code realization way, drag-and-drop threshold is low enough, At least kids can learn to program by dragging and dropping, which means a lot of adults can be trained to become companies’ own low code developers (a lot)
Obviously low code development has a strong platform attributes, namely no marginal growth enterprise needs (a variety of customized) and the development of huge amounts of supply (through training can mount guard low code development engineer), from a business point of view, the future is likely to be some low code in the field of different development platform, the platform is behind giant software enterprises, Just as Meituan supports millions of food delivery workers, low-code development platforms can support tens of millions of development engineers, compared to the current software engineers, obviously the threshold is much lower.
However, in my opinion, most of the low-code startups in China just see the wind, but haven’t figured out the logic behind it.
The latter
Low code is a very strong product, and if you just look at it from a technical point of view, I’m sure it’s hard to make anything out of it, but on the flip side, for a low code development platform with thousands of people working around it, the technical value behind it, the technical challenge is enough to breed a new engineer bonus. Whether that is the case remains to be seen.