"Deploying a commercial website ten years ago required significant upfront capital"
Actually... you could get a very large website up 10 years ago on almost nothing. $30/month dedicated servers were available that could do 10,000 connections at once. Which means you could serve millions of people cheaply. You could also get lots of virtual shared hosts for $5/month or less.
Heck, even 15 years ago you could do that. Maybe not everyone realised it till later, but it's not a new thing at all.
"Startups created simple APIs that abstract away complex back ends. Examples: Stripe (payments), Twilio (communications), Firebase (databases), Sift Science (fraud)."
There were plenty of services around on the internet 15 years ago with APIs too. Including payments, communications, databases, and fraud. I know because I developed some of them.
"Open Source. Open source dominates every level of the software stack, including operating systems (Linux), databases (MySql), web servers (Apache), and programming languages (Python, Ruby). These are not only free but generally also far higher quality than their commercial counterparts."
Guess what? Open source was around 10 years ago.
"Programming languages. Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python. Moore’s Law gave us excess computing resources. We spent it making developers more effective."
Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago. The same as perl, php, and haskell amongst others.
"Special-purpose tools for non-programmers. These tools let non-programmers create software in certain pre-defined categories, thereby lowering costs and reducing the demand for developers. Examples: Shopify (e-commerce), WordPress (blogging), and Weebly (small business websites)."
um... blogging, e-commerce, and lots of other non-programmer tools were around in the 90s.
"General-purpose tools for non-programmers. In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn’t been much work in these areas, but from what I’ve seen that might change soon. By allowing more people to program, these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."
Have you heard of the internet? Seen the reams of cut and paste code out there from semi-technical people? Whole industries are centered around letting less skilled people make software. This hasn't decreased, but increased. There's a whole "everyone should code" movement hitting us.
Is this the quality of article we want on this website? Please delete my account!? I'm done.