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