Indeed. I mean, just look at product hunt. Nearly every failure is due to lack of demand because there's already way too many competing products built. And there are a lot of failures. What is the percentage of apps that end up getting a sizeable userbase, less than 1%? There's already such a vast oversupply of software products out there without any additional platforms.

It's far more accurate to say, we need fewer software builders.

An exceedingly high number of restaurants fail in the first year, an industry that has existed for centuries. And we are still opening new ones.

This is normal, there will be more and new software products.

Software, unlike restaurants, has trivial economies of scale, and colossal start-up costs.

It's much cheaper to open a restaurant, then build a word processor that someone can get value out of. It's much harder to build your restaurant chain to serve 100,000 people, then it is to scale your word processor, that can serve 100 people, to serve 100,000 people.

It's pretty easy to build a tool or game that a few hundred people can get value out of though right?

No, because there's this weird thing about developing apps.

If you have too few users, this means that you can't afford to eat, while too many users means that other app developers can't afford to eat.

The company where I work has about a hundred engineers, and a team who makes tools for those engineers. There are uncountably many small niches of software customers, whether they're external or not.

This is completely misunderstanding what the article is talking about though - this isn't about launching saas products, it's about lowering the bar to creating bespoke software internal to businesses.

Businesses don't do well building processes on top of someone's proprietary Incredible Journey.

Lots of businesses built on top of excel.

I think you've made the parent's point

We need far more builders working on compatible open source platforms, apps, and tools, so we stop rebuilding dead end proprietary apps or, even worse, successful walled gardens.

Not software builders, but so-called 'citizen' developers.

We do not need more crappy young software builders without any pride in their craft. What we need is a lot fewer with their morals intact.

> A half billion apps sound way more than needed....

'Half a billion' figuratively speaking is not much, if you account for all internal apps in enterprise (ex approval flow for weekly cafeteria menu). If there are millions of small and medium enterprise then there would be millions of cafeteria menu app.

>if you account for all internal apps in enterprise (ex approval flow for weekly cafeteria menu)

I'd count that into the apps (and workflows) we don't need.

>A half billion apps will be created. We need more software builders

I also could use a half billion units sold.