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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, A
by throwGuardian 7y ago
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
- travisjungroth 7y agoYeah, 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?