
Fact: There Is Room for Your Big Software Idea - darkhorsematt
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/why-you-should-think-big-14d878a48f55
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throwGuardian
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

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travisjungroth
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_?

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bbody
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.

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Ericson2314
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.

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

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Ericson2314
You don't have to agree with it, just don't conflate it with the technical
nativity you mentioned above.

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buboard
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

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

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unraveller
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.

