Comment by apwell23

2 years ago

My feeling is that only big tech can now create any good apps since they all require massive compute now.

Yes writing a todo list app is now faster with copilot and stuff but thats now what i meant.

Please don't be discouraged by whatever "Big Tech" is doing.

Products that we build today represent many millions of decisions and trade-offs.

If you believe something should exist, please build it and don't worry about what anyone else is doing or saying.

I was working on an application in the early 2000's and learned that Gigantic Inc. launched something to solve the same problem. I immediately bowed out, and they immediately let that first-launched beta languish for more than 10 years with less staff than we had.

In the intervening years, another startup built a similar competitor and sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

As another example, I eventually worked at Gigantic Inc, and the org that I was part of had been failing to deliver a useful product to the public for about 7 years, and continued to fail for many more. This was an organization with hundreds of people and many hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, and they were being absolutely clobbered by a combination of their own unbelievable incompetence and the brutality of the market around them.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned in my career, is to never assume that just because Big Tech has some budget, that they also have attention or competence.

> since they all require massive compute now.

They do? How so? I can only think of a small subset of applications that require large amounts of compute.

Interesting, I actually feel the opposite. The scale at which big tech apps have to operate leads to a lot of bad UX and more bugs due to complexity. For example you can typically get much lower latency hosting a web app at or near your home than Google can provide.