> ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
Thank you!
I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.
We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.
Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.
Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.
Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.
The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.
Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.