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Theo Tarr's avatar

Interesting takes, a bunch of these arguments are new to me! As a software guy myself, I'd love to disagree with you, but I think a lot of these arguments make intuitive sense. There is so much competition that starting a profitable software company is near impossible, and keeping users happy and preventing churn is getting harder. However, I don't think this is a software industry specific phenomenon. You mentioned Tesla as being a great of example of a successful hardware (cars in this case, but really battery and solar tech) company. It's taken Tesla 20 years of continuous innovation to get to where it is now: barely profitable. I totally agree software is more competitive now than it has ever been. I think the common theme among these successful tech companies (hardware and software) is innovation and iteration. Tesla isn't successful because it's a hardware/auto manufacturer, but because it kept iterating until it built a product far better than the rest of the EV market. The same is true for software: Google and Microsoft haven't stopped innovating and as a result are multi-trillion dollar companies. SaaS isn't dead, but for small startups, the best bet to make real money is just to get acquired.

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