> I think part of the reason software was winner take most was the difficulty of making software.
That might be part of it, but I think it also has to do with the reality of replicating and scaling. Hardware or physical goods simply don’t scale like digital goods. There can be hundreds of knock-off physical products that have lower quality and lower cost but serve 90% of the same purpose, because physical capacity for raw materials, construction, labor, shipping, etc. have scaling limits in each market and economy. Digital goods are just so much easier to replicate and scale, so it often doesn’t make sense to buy software at lower quality and lower price if it doesn’t do most of the job. There are still limits of course, and different from physical goods, but I think this is a key reason why software is seen as winner-take-all.
Yes, but there are other digital goods, like music, movies and books which are not quite as hard to make as software. In those you have a hit driven market dynamic with lots of niches instead of winner take all.
I.e. because software was hard to make and complex to copy you would tend to have "natural monopolies" that were hard to compete with. Who wants to try to build a new desktop OS to compete with Windows? Or a web browser from scratch? Or a new search engine? Etc.
Those and other pieces of software were complex and hard to make. The cost to copy and compete was very high. So one winner took most because that winner was the company who could figure that software out.
But as we can see with Kimi Work and other such things, software is now much easier to copy. Let's say it took $1 billion to make a copycat piece of software with people but now takes $100 million or $10 million with AI. Suddenly a copy and compete tactic makes much more sense than before
For example, with AI it might make financial sense to build a Chinese Native OS instead of Windows. Similarly for Russia, Iran, the EU, and a whole bunch of other places. All of a sudden, Windows might not be the winner take most OS, we might have lots of Operating Systems, with smaller markets and lower profits, which require much more careful financial analysis to stay profitable.
This would be just like Movies, TV Shows, Books or Music. When something works, people relentlessly copy it and different regions put their own spin on the idea. After Iron Man succeeded we had so many super hero movies. Etc. So there is not really a winner take most dynamic in these other digital products. Software may be moving that way
I disagree the worth of software will become a lot less as LLM take hold and more people outside software devs know how to use them properly. I am the default IT manager for our small office as I am the guy most interested in tech and in the last 2-3 years I am getting llm to write python scripts for me to do work that would have cost $100s of dollars. Currently you need to pay $100-1000s for a software with 100s of features while you might actually need 1 or 2 of the features which you can get the llm to write for you.
As the LLM's keep getting better at writing software actual coding skills required will decrease which will result in a huge influx of software crashing prices. You can see this in already in open source projects in the last 6 months to a year Jellyfin had a huge influx of custom clients made by different people for fixing their own itches about the official software.
I don’t review all the code generated by an LLM, just like I’ve never read all the code in libraries I use.
I see AI-assisted software development as just another step up the stack. My goal in development is to solve a problem. I look for the most appropriate tools to solve that problem in the most reasonable way possible. For my entire career, that’s included using plenty of libraries that I didn’t write and don’t fully understand. It’s been abstracted away from me, so I can simply “look at the output” and move onto the next step to solve my problem.
To me, AI-assisted dev is very similar. The key difference being that the LLM is “producing” the “library” on the fly, customized to the prompts and context. So it hasn’t gone through the rigor that a properly reviewed and maintained OSS library has gone through. But then again, the models generating the code were trained on essentially all OSS that could be found, so in theory it builds on the collective principles.
I read the code if I’m curious, or if I’m feeling frustrated and in a mood to debug. But if the output looks good and it solves a problem, I’m moving onto the next one. I don’t expect it to be perfect. Software has had and always will have bugs.
That might be part of it, but I think it also has to do with the reality of replicating and scaling. Hardware or physical goods simply don’t scale like digital goods. There can be hundreds of knock-off physical products that have lower quality and lower cost but serve 90% of the same purpose, because physical capacity for raw materials, construction, labor, shipping, etc. have scaling limits in each market and economy. Digital goods are just so much easier to replicate and scale, so it often doesn’t make sense to buy software at lower quality and lower price if it doesn’t do most of the job. There are still limits of course, and different from physical goods, but I think this is a key reason why software is seen as winner-take-all.