1. In a competitive world you'd expect startups to pop up everywhere, and especially in areas with low cost of living. Reality: opposite.
2. Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.
3. When a ton of money is spent on marketing then that is strong evidence for lack of competition. After all, all money spent on marketing would otherwise go directly to the bottom line. This is why restaurants (fierce competition) spend almost nothing on marketing. They can't afford to. Fierce competition => low margins => no marketing budget. Reality: mediocre products and tons of marketing.
4. The advantages of the internet are not capitalized on by everybody, as I've been saying. The opportunity is there, but people still have to take it.
> Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.
This is because it's a sucker's game. You can build the best spreadsheet in the world and Microsoft will still eat your lunch. The expected returns on a goldfish-selling business are higher. LibreOffice can't even manage to give away a tenth as many as Microsoft sells. Like, yes, building a spreadsheet program is something people could do, but it is not an idea with even the remotest possibility of making good money.
I think I have figured out the fundamental disconnect here. You are talking about how easy it is to build stuff these days, while other people are talking about how easy it is to make a living off stuff. It is easy to build things. But building something alone is pure cost, no profit. Then the hard part comes. The difficulty has just shifted around, not disappeared.
2) Again, you are underestimating the effort to build a competitive spreadsheet and overestimating what intelligence or smart people are capable of achieving. First, you can take a look at the spreadsheet history and see that there was a lot of competition in computer history stages with more opportunity windows: how many developers were in the Apple/DOS era? Another important thing that you are not taking into account is the ecosystem for spreadsheets like Excel. It's not only Excel, but the whole Microsoft Office and Legacy Applications. Do you think that a Fortune 1000 company will take the risk of moving outside Excel?
3) No, just the contrary. Try yourself to gain traction with a free open source software and see how difficult it is.
4) That's what I said but it's being capitalized by a lot of people
1) Startups and small business are popping up everywhere and the majority die.
2. Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.
3. When a ton of money is spent on marketing then that is strong evidence for lack of competition. After all, all money spent on marketing would otherwise go directly to the bottom line. This is why restaurants (fierce competition) spend almost nothing on marketing. They can't afford to. Fierce competition => low margins => no marketing budget. Reality: mediocre products and tons of marketing.
4. The advantages of the internet are not capitalized on by everybody, as I've been saying. The opportunity is there, but people still have to take it.