What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far.
Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T.
Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! The last record got broken just a few months ago...".
What is happening in other mature markets with good dynamics is that gains come much more slowly and it becomes "boring" so you don't think about it too much. You get an incredibly efficient and secure car for a few thousand dollars, profits come from people who buy for status. If you look at the truck industry or aviation, the margins are really low, buyers mostly care about price there.
Most people don't need more than a smartphone, they already buy for status, others need a Mac or a cloud instance like truck drivers need a special kind of car to do their work.
There are just so many car companies, there will be just so many cloud hosters with will compete for ever shrinking margins to run your cloud-function-app magically infinitely scalable on their gigantic datacenters. If you want your own get a raspberry pi rack.
This is amazing, this frees so much energy and resources to focus on other stuff that matters.
Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.
Then SpaceX and Blue Origin will compete to bring your 3D-Printed robot spaceship into space you just simulated in your hyperrealistic Kerbal Space Program. The enabler here is price per kilogram to orbit.
That's where my imagination stops, because it's "the final frontier" and the problems there are really infinitely hard.
Oh great, my general ledger is now free, but in return I have to route all my data through a semi-trusted 3rd party with unclear motives, who is financially incentivized to act against my interests, and who can force-deploy workflow-breaking updates whenever they choose, and maybe is secure but who can ever tell...
Rant over. I actually like WhatsApp. It’s pretty far from perfect though.
Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T.
Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! The last record got broken just a few months ago...".
What is happening in other mature markets with good dynamics is that gains come much more slowly and it becomes "boring" so you don't think about it too much. You get an incredibly efficient and secure car for a few thousand dollars, profits come from people who buy for status. If you look at the truck industry or aviation, the margins are really low, buyers mostly care about price there.
Most people don't need more than a smartphone, they already buy for status, others need a Mac or a cloud instance like truck drivers need a special kind of car to do their work.
There are just so many car companies, there will be just so many cloud hosters with will compete for ever shrinking margins to run your cloud-function-app magically infinitely scalable on their gigantic datacenters. If you want your own get a raspberry pi rack.
This is amazing, this frees so much energy and resources to focus on other stuff that matters.
Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.
Then SpaceX and Blue Origin will compete to bring your 3D-Printed robot spaceship into space you just simulated in your hyperrealistic Kerbal Space Program. The enabler here is price per kilogram to orbit.
That's where my imagination stops, because it's "the final frontier" and the problems there are really infinitely hard.