
Software markets and businesses are 10x bigger due to the internet - eladgil
http://blog.eladgil.com/2019/05/markets-are-10x-bigger-than-ever.html
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frabcus
My experience of this is that the size makes it harder as an entrepreneur to
access the market.

You can't, say, develop a local presence and become the best in your corner of
the country, as you hit global competition from mature products right at the
start.

What's everyone else's experience?

~~~
sdegutis
From a simple consumer's perspective, I'm content with all software I already
have, and don't have extra money to burn. The few times I need more software,
I can usually find free (and open source) solutions pretty quickly, and I've
never had to compile it myself.

From a seller's perspective, I've made software that I found useful and
nobody's ever willing to pay for it. The few times I did make money off
software, it was because it was shiny, during the era when shiny software got
attention and made money. And even then, it was short lived.

I personally think we've exhausted all categories of software possibilities.
What society could really use now is to reinvent existing software in a
reasonable way, with better principles:

\- Make software much more interoperable with other software, and invent
decent protocols for this.

\- Make software less invasive of our lives, and less manipulative of our
minds, moods, and attention spans.

\- Make software that encourages you to get the job done and move on with your
life, rather than optimizing for endless consumption.

Put another way, imagine there was no software at all right now, but we still
know everything we know about software. And imagine avaricious people didn't
call the shots, but the software engineers who care make the decisions.
Imagine we could still collaborate with one another as fast as we do now. All
you have is hardware and a bunch of specs and firmware. Now, what could
humanity come up with?

That's what we should be working towards.

~~~
esoterica
> I personally think we've exhausted all categories of software possibilities.

640k programs should be enough for everyone.

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paulsutter
Only 10x? How large would Facebook, Uber, or AirBnB be on a 1980’s BBS? an
1880’s telegraph network? a 1780s campfire?

The other examples may have been 10x each but the Internet seems more like
1,000,000x

