I have the same feeling, especially in the mobile world. If you look at the App store and the stats about how mobile devs are making money it appears clearly th

I have the same feeling, especially in the mobile world. If you look at the App store and the stats about how mobile devs are making money it appears clearly that most of the apps are failures financially speaking. When you have hundred thousands of free games, you better come up with a deadly addictive smart buzz generating game if you want to make any living out of it! But then there is also an other point: how people see things. Let's take the "To do list" example. None of my friends and coworker are using the same app, they all are die hard fans of their app. That's what happens when everybody comes with it's vision of how the to do list should be done. You end up with hundreds of app doing the exact same thing and they will almost all find their users, because nobody agrees on what should be the standard. That is inherent to software and human nature, lots of the startups are not creating anything new, just re-implementing their version of something they think must be done differently! That being said, as the number of startup grows and the number of garbage projects/products grow you see also crazy ambitious and life changing stuff emerging. I think the analogy to the gold rush made by an other guy here is very pertinent! While most people are ending up with a handful of dirt, some rare lucky diggers got trucks full of gold! The economical dynamic created by the Startups in SV and everywhere else is bringing wealth to the US like crazy. Eventually everybody benefit of it to some extent. But that's only my opinion.