Comment by berkes

> But what are the parts in the digital world?

In essence, all software is a service; often legally even. But for this we'd need to look at software that's "shipped" to all customers in more or less the same form. But is also not a full blown end-user product. Taking that, we can look at "parts" or even "partial products" as:

* B2B SAAS services. From microservices to large services. From API-only to full blown UI based. That reservation system for nail-studios or the extract-PDF-to-our-bookeeping-API.

* B2B Mobile apps. E.g. a scanner-app to help with packaging or finding in a warehouse. Or a PoS for restaurants or shops.

* Hosted versions of FLOSS software. e.g. nexcloud, mastodon, matomo, a ci-pipeline, SIP, LMS, CMS, etc.

* Managed common PAAS parts. Managed Postgres, managed LDAP, managed CI, managed firewall etc. Not on-prem (that would be services) but more like AWS, but then from local "Vendors".

* Plugins and micro-saas. Just look at the amount of paid-for plugins in shopify, salesforce, google docs, github-marketplace etc. etc.

Almost all of these could be startups. But have a very restricted TAM. So they'll remain small. They also don't deliver a full-blown end-user-product, but something that's built on top of other common IT components. They often have very localized focus (a common restaurant reservation in France is very different from a reservation in the Netherlands, for example), often have a benefit from being trusted on a human level (I'd either backup my companies data to some FAANG, or to that one guy that I know and has been servicing my company for the last decades very well already).

But most of all, they are too small to become scale-ups in the "silicon valley" sense. Because in doing so, they'd loose all that makes them valuable today.

(Source: I've worked at or on many such "startups" that would forever remain small but big enough for the founders to get a solid income from)