alt Hacker News> I think part of the reason software was winner take most was the difficulty of making software.
That might be part of it, but I think it also has to do with the reality of replicating and scaling. Hardware or physical goods simply don’t scale like digital goods. There can be hundreds of knock-off physical products that have lower quality and lower cost but serve 90% of the same purpose, because physical capacity for raw materials, construction, labor, shipping, etc. have scaling limits in each market and economy. Digital goods are just so much easier to replicate and scale, so it often doesn’t make sense to buy software at lower quality and lower price if it doesn’t do most of the job. There are still limits of course, and different from physical goods, but I think this is a key reason why software is seen as winner-take-all.
Yes, but there are other digital goods, like music, movies and books which are not quite as hard to make as software. In those you have a hit driven market dynamic with lots of niches instead of winner take all.
I.e. because software was hard to make and complex to copy you would tend to have "natural monopolies" that were hard to compete with. Who wants to try to build a new desktop OS to compete with Windows? Or a web browser from scratch? Or a new search engine? Etc.
Those and other pieces of software were complex and hard to make. The cost to copy and compete was very high. So one winner took most because that winner was the company who could figure that software out.
But as we can see with Kimi Work and other such things, software is now much easier to copy. Let's say it took $1 billion to make a copycat piece of software with people but now takes $100 million or $10 million with AI. Suddenly a copy and compete tactic makes much more sense than before
For example, with AI it might make financial sense to build a Chinese Native OS instead of Windows. Similarly for Russia, Iran, the EU, and a whole bunch of other places. All of a sudden, Windows might not be the winner take most OS, we might have lots of Operating Systems, with smaller markets and lower profits, which require much more careful financial analysis to stay profitable.
This would be just like Movies, TV Shows, Books or Music. When something works, people relentlessly copy it and different regions put their own spin on the idea. After Iron Man succeeded we had so many super hero movies. Etc. So there is not really a winner take most dynamic in these other digital products. Software may be moving that way