Software has done miracles for us. The chief characteristic of software responsible for its boom is its scalability and distribution power. The software revolution of the 90’s followed by smartphone revolution of the past decade has put the access to the internet in billions of hands. So now software industry has billions of people to serve to, who are now hooked 24x7 to their screens.
The rise of software and the internet, led to drastic reductions in the cost of content distribution . Building a websites or a billion-dollar app became the next big thing. This booming digital economy created many new industries and jobs.
Back then, any random developer from any corner of the world could code an app. He would than sit back and relax ,to find millions of people downloading his app, eventually minting millions.
The first-movers in the game profited the most.
The low cost of distribution explains why valuation of some Tech companies went higher than national GDPs of most countries.
The popularity of coding and coding alone has been spurred by the growth of the app store ,Facebook advt. platforms a, social media and gaming and iPhone/android apps.
But that era is mostly over.
The next Zuckerberg will not make Facebook 2.0 and it may not be a social network or not even an website at all.
Early adopters were of such technologies sci-fi geeks. They generally have a higher exploration coefficient.
At its inception the app store and the play store hosted very few apps. These days 4000 apps are uploaded everyday.
Your app might have the best UI/UX and may be the most innovative product in the market, but still holds ever-decreasing-minimal chance of ever getting noticed/downloaded ,let alone going viral.
The world had 7 billion people. Of that 3 billion are are already on the Internet. We still have that 1-billion-user idea of the internet.
The way by which people interact with their devices has been changing for some time now. According to surveys, most people spend 90% of their internet time on just the apps WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram and maybe on YouTube. 90% of the app that the user installs from play store are never opened for the second time.
Coding is now mostly an commodity .Most of it has already been outsourced to cheap labour in India and China. So when you say you are a good coder you are exposing yourself to the ocean of competition.
In the new-internet the customer order food via WhatsApp and not a website/app. People pay through WhatsApp Pay, commit shopping transaction via Instagram and Facebook. Blogs are no longer shared on independent websites. People don’t download an app to learn how to repair their car, but watch YouTube video. A website that teaches the user about making a pizza, is not competing with other websites but competing for attention with a Facebook and Instagram pages and YouTube that already host several videos on this topic.
Some of the big opportunity may be built on top of social media platforms like YouTube simply because the distribution power of YouTube is going to be far grater than publishing an app to the iOS app store in which your app will just vanish among the millions of other apps out there on the store.
Smart creators are creating community over discord , WhatsApp groups and email list. Avalon, Random Internet and MorningBrew are few of the success stories.
The only difference between a good app/website and a bad one is the traction that the creators are able to generate at the launch and for how long could the creators sustain the traction.
So for example combining the technology of a programmer with the distribution power of an influencer may be one of the success recipe for this decade.
The distribution networks has value of its own can could be monetised easily in most of the cases.
The top of the hierarchy of this new internet will be the community builders and content creators and not necessarily coders.
New decade, new world , new oppurtunities. Are you ready?
