Because those who can market themselves lean to 'easier' spaces. Think of it this way. I'm a very terrible programmer. My understanding of the O notation is ab

Because those who can market themselves lean to 'easier' spaces. Think of it this way. I'm a very terrible programmer. My understanding of the O notation is abysmal at best. If you ask me to write a distributed database, I probably won't do a good job at it. But you know what I can write? Webapps! Any Tom Dick and Harry can write them. People who can market themselves well and can write the easy stuff wins. And with that comes the compound effect of the rich getting richer. Example: I write the next social network and I market the hell out of it. Now I'm the cool company that people who are really good in computer science want to join, since you know, I've scaled out to the point where data is big enough to warrant the term 'Big Data', where information retrieval is now a problem. Imagine instead if I were say a very very good biologist. That also typically means my focus is very very narrow, and doesn't lend itself to marketability. I cannot start a company saying I want to create a drug that turns off production of the PRSS3 enzyme. No, I'd have to market it as "I am creating a drug cure for prostate cancer". But I can't and I won't (if I am being honest with myself), because all I know about prostate cancer is the PRSS3 enzyme. There are other factors that causes prostate cancer. People who are experts in their fields are generally stuck on the narrow field they're in. A PRSS3 researcher would know everything there is to know about the PRSS3 enzyme. He/she would probably suck at marketing it though. Same with say, information retrieval experts. The people who don't give talks at XYZ conference. The people who work behind the scenes, engineering everything - they don't market themselves well. As a result, the people who best market themselves win. The easiest things to make are also usually quite easy to market. tl;dr: people flock to 'easier' spaces because that's what's easy to market to. Programmers flock to the latest SoLoMo startups, because SoLoMo is easy to market to hackers. wow I'm so ranty today