Hacker News Reader

Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

My sense is that in general, and especially in software, the world is becoming more of a winner take all place. This is not a good thing.

View on HN

Yes, but there will always be niches where you can make good money, but not enough for the big fish to be interested. For example, my wife uses some statistical software that is apparently pretty popular in her field, but it's still only used within a niche of academia. You might be able to find a niche that brings you $10M/year in profit which is enough to live a lavish lifestyle, but not enough for VCs to fund you or for Amazon to bother competing with you.

Man I'd settle for 200K/year

With near zero marginal costs associated with software, it makes sense for a winner take all outcome to be the equillibrium.

...which is why you need strong regulatory oversight if you want the software market to have any functioning level of efficiency.

The economies of scale are enormous in software (and data-oriented businesses in general). That's good for the efficiency of any given enterprise, but it pushes very heavily towards monopolization and zero competition without regulatory force to counterbalance.

That doesn’t hold at all unless there is significant lock-in that raises switching cost. If there is a company sitting there with no overhead collecting $10m/year for software all of its customers hate, it’s ripe for competition to take it overnight.

Makes sense for who? If all competition becomes winner takes all, then most humans become losers.

Makes sense as an equilibrium point. I wasn't making a moral claim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com