alt Hacker NewsAI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
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It cheaper to create one-off products. Creating a sustainable business though? Charging money for the product or service? Actually getting enough income to thrive? I think that also just got a lot harder. Sure, you quit and you undermined BigCo with your open source release, but somebody with even less to lose will now undermine you.
Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
The side effect of this is also that the value of software itself has never been lower, so starting a new software business isn't very attractive in today's market.
> It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
I have been pondering whether I am a fool to continue to go it as an employee in the age of AI.
The skillset needed to be a productive employee who is, say, a programmer is not the same at all as the skillset to run an entire business.
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.