These are businesses with extra-large capital requirements. You ain't replicating them, because you don't have the money, and they can easily strangle you with their money as you start out.

Software is different, you need very very little to start, historically just your own skills and time. Thes latter two may see some changes with LLMs.

Okay, we will copy that version of the product too.

There is more to it than the code and software provided in most cases I feel.

I think `andrekandre is right in this hypothetical.

Who'd pay for brand new Photoshop with a couple new features and improvements if LLM-cloned Photoshop-from-three-months-ago is free?

The first few iterations of this cloud be massively consumer friendly for anything without serious cloud infra costs. Cheap clones all around. Like generic drugs but without the cartel-like control of manufacturing.

Business after that would be dramatically different, though. Differentiating yourself from the willing-to-do-it-for-near-zero-margin competitors to produce something new to bring in money starts to get very hard. Can you provide better customer support? That could be hard, everyone's gonna have a pretty high baseline LLM-support-agent already... and hiring real people instead could dramatically increase the price difference you're trying to justify... Similarly for marketing or outreach etc; how are you going to cut through the AI-agent-generated copycat spam that's gonna be pounding everyone when everyone and their dog has a clone of popular software and services?

Photoshop type things are probably a really good candidate for disruption like that because to a large extent every feature is independent. The noise reduction tool doesn't need API or SDK deps on the layer-opacity tool, for instance. If all your features are LLM balls of shit that doesn't necessarily reduce your ability to add new ones next to them, unlike in a more relational-database-based web app with cross-table/model dependencies, etc.

And in this "try out any new idea cheaply and throw crap against the wall and see what sticks" world "product managers" and "idea people" etc are all pretty fucked. Some of the infinite monkeys are going to periodically hit to gain temporary advantage, but good luck finding someone to pay you to be a "product visionary" in a world where any feature can be rolled out and tested in the market by a random dev in hours or days.