The flood is going inward, not outward
The common prediction says cheap software means a flood of new apps to buy. The real flood is going inward — internal tools that never leave the company, growing with its data and its way of working.
The TL;DR about marketplaces is that more free plugins are likely to emerge, be reused, and further developed. Which is again not great news for small, medium and niche SaaS.
Here is the usual prediction. Building software just got cheap. So we will see a flood of new apps on the market, like the App Store boom around 2010.
That prediction is mostly wrong. It describes a side effect and misses the main event.
The real flood is not arriving in public app stores. It is arriving inside companies. Internal dashboards. Custom plugins. Small workflow tools that never leave the building.
One survey of enterprise teams found that a third had already replaced at least one paid software tool with a custom build. Most expected to build more in the coming year.
Because software, process, and proprietary data grow together over time, which is hard to.
The TL;DR about marketplaces is that more free plugins are likely to emerge, be reused, and further developed. Which is again not great news for small, medium and niche SaaS.
The difference between a Mega Drive and enterprise software is that nobody's production database was at stake when you left Sonic paused overnight.
So we will see a flood of new apps on the market, like the App Store boom around 2010.
And here is the part that matters most. The advantage is not just that companies now have custom tools. We always had some of those.
The advantage is that the software, the process, and the company's own data now grow together, over time. That history is hard for anyone outside to copy. It is not only a technical barrier. The tool carries the company's specific way of working.
The difference between a Mega Drive and enterprise software is that nobody's production database was at stake when you left Sonic paused overnight.
Because software, process, and proprietary data grow together over time, which is hard to copy.
The common prediction says cheap software means a flood of new apps to buy. The real flood is going inward — internal tools that never leave the company, growing with its data and its way of working.
This is the short version. Read the full-length essay, “Enterprise assisted-coding is the new Mega Drive. How to survive the creative chaos?”.
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