I disagree though, he wouldn't sell at a market rate, he would sell below, and enough below that market saturates at his own price, this either increases the market size or new markets based on the wider and cheaper availability of his product emerge.
Recognizing what to do is the most important.
However, bare in mind there are math involved here.
If the market sells 1 ton of iron for 20$ (manual labour) and I manage to get a truck I could either sell 1 ton for 20$ as the others and make more profit than them, or I could sell, let's say 1 ton for 10$. This is a strategic move that would squeeze the competition, but it means I sell more product for less money than others. It's not 100% the correct move for every company at every buisness sector.
There are even more agressive moves, selling goods bellow cost in order to squeeze out the competition. There are even less companies that can pull this off.
At the end of the day, technological advantages are ephemeral and are meant to be used (by whichever strategy) while the competition hasn't caught up yet. When the competition catches up prices inevitably fall (unless there is a cartel of course but that is another topic)
The scalability of software greatly amplifies this point.
It's not the work being done that creates value, the work must be done, sure, it can be done by anyone.. Most programmers have the technical skill to build billion dollar products, and some of them do (mostly for others), and yet, most of us are not "fu" rich, because we've not had the idea for what to build with those skills.
If you have a great idea, can you covert it to money without working? No. Maybe, you might say, you can sell it to smdy else, thus you made money. Ok. Does this person who bought your idea made any money without putting in any work? No.
I challenge you to become rich by making up a lot of great ideas and doing none of the work. Go ahead.
Work = Easy. Good idea = Hard.
Ideas are not good just because someone who has them think they're good, there are lots and lots of bad ideas, and for most of them, their owner is under the illusion that they're good.
However, the market is full of popular, poorly implemented ideas. So I guess you're right.
> If someone comes along start doing strip mining by truck and bulldozer, they will spend a fraction of the man hours, and yet create orders of magnitude more value
They only reason the truck guy would create orders of magnitude more value is that, in genreral, the rest of the people would work manually. The truck guy would sell the volume of mined materials at the market rate and the market rate is based on manual labor. The truck guy has an advantage. When everyone gets a truck though, his advantage will be lost. He will make as much money as the others and prices will drop because suddenly everyone has a truck and it cheaper to mine because way less manual labour is involved