{"id":123,"date":"2008-10-02T15:01:58","date_gmt":"2008-10-02T19:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2008\/10\/02\/were-smart-is-no-longer-a-barrier-to-entry\/"},"modified":"2008-10-02T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2008-10-02T19:01:58","slug":"were-smart-is-no-longer-a-barrier-to-entry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/were-smart-is-no-longer-a-barrier-to-entry\/","title":{"rendered":"“We’re smart” is no longer a barrier to entry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over\u00a0creamed chipped beef<\/a>\u00a0this morning, I subjected my friend\u00a0Antonio<\/a>\u00a0to my latest rants on challenges and opportunities in the software business. \u00a0He helped me crisp up a major theme: \u00a0being smart is no longer a barrier to entry.<\/p>\n

Software used to be really really hard: \u00a0there weren’t a lot of developers (and few that were superstars), languages were primitive, tools were primitive (and expensive), the stack was expensive and buggy, and\u00a0servers cost real money<\/a>. \u00a0Dev cycles of 12-18 months weren’t crazy, because it sometimes took that long to build something meaningful. \u00a0Sometimes\u00a0merely having\u00a0shipping\u00a0software was enough of a barrier.<\/p>\n

Today, things are much easier: \u00a0dynamic languages are hugely productive, the tools+stack are free, free code libraries are everywhere, and fast\u00a0servers can be rented<\/a>\u00a0by the hour. \u00a0Smart developers abound (they may not want to work at your company, but they’re out there competing with you). \u00a0Useful functionality can be built in days, weeks or a few months.<\/p>\n

So what does this mean? \u00a0It means that software efforts doing things that are easy and plentiful generally aren’t going to be worth that much — it’s\u00a0supply and demand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the effort to be truly valuable, it needs some barrier element\u00a0beyond “we have really smart people with a clever idea”. \u00a0 There are LOTS of smart\u00a0people\u00a0out there that can re-implement your idea, or cherry-pick the essential parts. \u00a0If you only spent 2-3 months building it, you don’t have much of a head start.<\/p>\n

The key is to attach the software to some non-replicable element<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over\u00a0creamed chipped beef\u00a0this morning, I subjected my friend\u00a0Antonio\u00a0to my latest rants on challenges and opportunities in the software business. \u00a0He helped me crisp up a major theme: \u00a0being smart is no longer a barrier to entry. Software used to be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}