I don't think that's true at all.

I don't think that's true at all. The trouble is the aspirin is free. Node, jQuery, Python, pick-your-language-or-framework, almost all are free. The point of the article is that if you want to make a pain killer, it better be vicodin not aspirin. And even then, if it's a large enough problem, likely someone who can offer it for free will make slightly-less-good-but-free vicodin. I think for infrastructure as a business to work you need to find a sweet spot of: 1.) a serious pain point 2.) for a large number of customers who do not have the resources to solve it themselves, and 3.) that is hard enough to solve that it can't be solved by a quickly hacked together product. In particular to 3, one example I can think of is a problem requiring a very complicated but powerful user interface. Oh, and then you actually need to solve it, track down the customers and convince them to pay for it. Overall it's a tough needle to thread.

Posted by entee on Mar 20, 2015, 7:38 PM

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