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Are we underestimating just how fundamentally AI is changing the economics of software development?
The interesting thing isn’t that someone can now write an app in their bedroom. It’s that the same person can potentially operate an entire software business from their bedroom.
The barriers to entry are collapsing. Software development, testing, documentation, customer support, billing, licensing and infrastructure can increasingly be automated or outsourced. What once required a company employing 20 people might increasingly be done by one or two.
And that changes the competitive landscape enormously.
I do think Adobe needs to worry about hundreds or thousands of small developers producing highly capable, specialist applications at a fraction of the traditional development cost. Those applications don’t even need to replace Photoshop. They just need to do particular jobs better or more cheaply. Collectively, they could take away a substantial part of the market.
Big software companies still have enormous advantages, especially their established ecosystems and customer bases. But I suspect they’re in for a much rougher ride than many people expect. As an aside, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein started migrating its government computers from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice in 2024 after a long pilot project.
I think we’re witnessing a fundamental change in the software industry.
The interesting thing isn’t that someone can now write an app in their bedroom. It’s that the same person can potentially operate an entire software business from their bedroom.
The barriers to entry are collapsing. Software development, testing, documentation, customer support, billing, licensing and infrastructure can increasingly be automated or outsourced. What once required a company employing 20 people might increasingly be done by one or two.
And that changes the competitive landscape enormously.
I do think Adobe needs to worry about hundreds or thousands of small developers producing highly capable, specialist applications at a fraction of the traditional development cost. Those applications don’t even need to replace Photoshop. They just need to do particular jobs better or more cheaply. Collectively, they could take away a substantial part of the market.
Big software companies still have enormous advantages, especially their established ecosystems and customer bases. But I suspect they’re in for a much rougher ride than many people expect. As an aside, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein started migrating its government computers from Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice in 2024 after a long pilot project.
I think we’re witnessing a fundamental change in the software industry.
