Software Startup Scarcity

> Mediocre software provides no valueMay I ask what mythical realm you are posting to HN from? I hail from planet Earth, and I would have to estimate that approximately 99% of all software we use is a) mediocre and b) nonetheless a source of value! ;)I think the point of the OP's quote is that there is room for many companies in any market, even ones that seem saturated (such as Italian restaurants). You can compete and make a good money just by delivering some value, and if

This is a perfect example of cargo cult thinking. Just because you're a tech start-up doesn't automatically put you on the same level with Google and Microsoft. Both of those companies have products which require a team of developers with understanding of computational complexities of algorithms, data structures and etc (think of Windows, Visual Studio IDE, Google Chrome/OS, Bing/Google search engines). I'm yet to find out how this applies to your featured list of companies such as Disqus, DropB

Plenty of bootstrapped companies != all the software and apps we have today

Most of the software-based 'hard problem' niches that are accessible to programmers without specialized domain knowledge outside software were filled by startups in the 70s and 80s that are now the establishment. Nobody is going to fund another word processor, operating system, or DBMS.Web startups are attractive because they have low capital requirements, don't need much domain knowledge, and are more closely tied to changes in culture than technology, so there are always a few open niches.

This should shock no one.Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home, with a stimulus check and nothing to do. Rather than a flurry of new software you got mas

The thousands of software devs that got laid off aren't starting businesses.They're also not a cross-domain expert at the same things you are. You might be in the top N coders in a niche, and you might be the only one with the motivation to work on the problem.You also might just do it better than them.And last, you might just split the pie with them. Really, it's okay to have many apps doing the same thing with different approaches.

Nature has limited free energy for its creations.Besides, tens of thousands of separate software companies can easily develop in parallel.There's only a bottleneck when you assume that this stuff has to come from a BigTech giant. The same mistake people made with PCs and Windows in the 1990s.

What do you expect ? you are at HN, and the bubble is strong here.Heck even the large recent trend among app developers and business analysts for low-code tools, tools that require mostly GUI and some code to get pretty complex applications going, offering maybe 5x-10x (or more) boost to productivity - that trend wasn't even mentioned at HN over the last few years, even though it seems like a really important trend, if you develop software or start businesses.That just makes me wish

My two cents:The 90s and 00s were a very unique time in business and tech history. With just a computer, internet connection, and knowledge of a few programming languages, anybody could start a site or an app. Because they were among the first to do it, they got rich.Nowadays, although the cost of computing is way down (more people have computers/mobiles and cloud computing is dirt cheap compared to the on-site hosting a decade or two ago), the necessary complexity for a novel IT prod

Probably has to do with the current booming environment for starting a technology business. It is fairly easy to start a technology related business, of course it is probably harder to actually succeed.Software development is also a very creative process, which means people who engage in it on average are probably going to have many ideas of their own that don't necessarily fit the interest of their employer.