Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement

One of the things the tech economies try to commedituze is developers. While you sounding nice, the whole tech company push for "everyone can code" is an effort to commodetize developers. Having free and open source compilers and languages also serves to reduce the cost of entry and commodetize developers. In the past, developers would pay hundreds of dollars for compilers and languages (which is actually cheap compared to what other professions pay for their tools). Developers volunteer to teach…

I've seen descriptions of this strategy before, but this particular article lists way more concrete examples than I've seen before, which makes me wonder if it is now the default across the entire tech industry at all times. Also: the strategy seems to depend upon a "greater fool," or just high risk-takers to fill in the complement with what is ultimately low or zero profit product. How can we guard against being that high-risk fool? I mean, from the article…

> “There’s An App For That” is why you buy an iPhone—but it’s Apple with the $930 billion market cap & not the app developers. Oh yeah? Tell that to Facebook, Netflix, and the YouTube part of Google. Tell that to Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok. There’s another principle at play here, and I think it’s an important one. Pleasantly, it also operates as a kind of Golden Rule for economics in platform development (and has legs at a wider scale…

Really great article from Stratechery that informs a lot of my thinking on the subject: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/