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.
That is an interesting take. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what the implications are if most startups are then focused on getting acquired by larger tech companies (i.e. the Google's, Meta's, etc...)
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.
That is an interesting take. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what the implications are if most startups are then focused on getting acquired by larger tech companies (i.e. the Google's, Meta's, etc...)