Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter.
In such markets, what you produce is either worth nothing or worth millions of dollars. For as long as it's the case that well-constructed code (with or without LLM help) is more likely to be in the latter category, the economics of software don't really change.
Even before LLMs, you could've commissioned a half-assed clone of any app you wanted from a 3rd world consultancy for a few thousand dollars. LLMs are basically Bangalore-as-API.
I think part of the reason software was winner take most was the difficulty of making software.
I remember hearing a story that in the past movies were so technically difficult to make that any movie that got made had a good chance to be a profitable hit. But as movies got cheaper to make, more movies got made. Nowadays movie studio execs have to really calculate out the audience and expected revenue for any new movie and balance that against the budget and the cost of the studio's failed movies.
I think a similar dynamic may happen in software
> 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
That honestly sounds a lot healthier than “just ship what the CTO/Product team wants” with as much hand waving as is necessary to very roughly estimate ROI and then pray it hits with the market. In anything that’s not a startup operating in a new industry, the “old way” is a hard way to run a business
> Since software is still a winner-takes-all market, the mass-production property of software doesn't really matter.
Fairly sure software dev was always an iceberg. Most software and most software devs aren't working on horizontal software, but on vertical software, in cost centers. Sales for that kind of software don't scale as much.
Most vertical software is just horizontal software glued together