> Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catch

> Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. Can we provide an example that isn't also a big company? I'm not really thinking of big companies that don't either dogfood their own tech or rely on someone bigger to handle things they don't want to (Apple spends 30m a month on AWS, as an example[0]). You could also make the argument that kind of no matter what route you take you're "relying on" some big player in some big space. What OS are the servers in your in-house data center running? Who's the core maintainer of whatever dev frameworks you might ascribe to (note: An employee of your company being the core maintainer of a bespoke framework that you developed in house and use is a much worse problem to have than being beholden to AWS ELB, as an example). This kinda just sounds like knowledge and progress. We build abstractions on top of technologies so that every person doesn't have to know the nitty gritty of the underlying infra, and can instead focus on orchestrating the abstractions. It's literally all turtles. Is it important, when setting up a MySQL instance, to know how to write a lexer and parser in C++? Obviously not. But lexers and parsers are a big part of MySQL's ability to function, right? [0]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/apple-spends-more-than-30-million-on-amazon-web-services-a-month.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/apple-spends-more-than-30-mi...