Fact: There Is Room for Your Big Software Idea | Hacker News Reader

Fact: There Is Room for Your Big Software Idea

medium.com

Who's to say software won't turn out like oil/energy. Before tech companies took the mantle of "highest market cap", Exxon & friends ruled the roost. [Google, Apple, Microsoft] look a lot like Exxon today, with their biggest defensive moat being scale.

Upstarts prove a new market (Pebble, Roku, etc.) only to have entrenched players take over and dominate. Or, you have to relegate yourself to very small SMBs differentiating yourself with support-costs:revenue ratios that bigger players simply aren't interested in

Yeah, the author’s arguments don’t support his conclusion of “go build something awesome”.

He points out the gas turbine was invented in 1791 and software in 1948. It seems to imply that software is in an equivalent state today to what the internal combustion engine was in the 1860s. This is ridiculous. Engines weren’t used by the majority of the world every day.

What’s to say that software today isn’t in the state that the automobile industry was in the 1950s: the future will generally be dominated by the large incumbents.

I have no doubt that there’s room in the future for my software idea. But is the room for me?

I hear a lot from people say "all the low hanging fruit have been taken" or "all the big ideas are already done" with regards to tech businesses. Definitely lacks both foresight and hindsight.

It's not that everything has been done. It's that the economics are not conducive to further baby steps, despite this still being the beginning of the beginning, technologically.

Doesn't matter how low the fruit is if the monopolistic glass ceiling is even lower.

I don't agree with those statements, I just hear it a fair bit and it irritates me.

You don't have to agree with it, just don't conflate it with the technical nativity you mentioned above.

Computers arent getting much faster though, and software can only get so far without faster computers. The horizontal expansion with the cloud is no solution, it's like adding more wheels to a car. Machine learning is already challenging the limits of circuits and it has to scale up enormously for real AI. As long as Big Corp keeps hoovering the blood of everyone else , whatever value is created requires more effort for less return. And there are other things that are very important such as payments, which are just as slow/bad as before the 'net. just some counterpoints

There's also room for your small, niche software idea. You don't need to be the next Facebook/Twitter to succeed.

There's no space for nuance in this pep talk. Users will not decide to use your software because of your perception of the maturity of the tech world as a whole! Users will decide on features they expect in the moment, ones they can grasp quickly enough.

The growth-at-all-costs mantra proves that all of big tech believes they are playing a winner takes all game. I'm inclined to believe them considering how much they value user habituation and abhor competing visions that liberate.

They used to say a customer needs to buy from you 5 times to establish brand loyalty. Now I wonder if these monopolies think they need 2 or 3 generations of offspring acting on impulse to achieve world domination.

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