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Don't be fooled by the huge apparent "supply". That's like counting up all the five-paragraph essays and unsold screenplays in the world and concluding that we
by mechanical_fish 12y ago
Don't be fooled by the huge apparent "supply". That's like counting up all the five-paragraph essays and unsold screenplays in the world and concluding that we have an oversupply of great writing.
What we have is a huge slush pile, 98% of which will prove worthless in the end except as a practice exercise for its creators. (Which is valuable, of course, just not valuable to the customers.) Because the bottleneck is the market. That's where the culling happens.
Like the majority of screenplays, most products are dead on arrival because they can't be effectively marketed. That is in part because the marketplace is crowded, but again: Don't mistake the stacks and stacks of App Store offerings for a saturated market. It's just a market choked with weeds.
One of the things the world needs is better software markets. The fact that you can't hear people screaming about their terrible software, or see and count the money that they would potentially pay for better software, is a sign of the market's ineffectiveness.
- rmc 12y ago> What we have is a huge slush pile, 98% of which will prove worthless in the end Don't forget Sturgeon's Law[1], "90% of anything is crap": > The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law