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The advantage of the software industry over hardware is that hardware is bounded by the laws of physics and the costs of making things and moving them around. This brings on a lot more recurring costs— replacing worn out equipment, transportation costs, and the costs to continue to produce more product. Starlink cannot be a money maker without finding ways around entropy and the costs of putting satellites in orbit. Microsoft was and still is doing software. Sure software has development costs, and needs a few plugs and patches, but it doesn’t really cost anything to ship software (and it’s mostly downloaded from a server these days anyway). Software doesn’t wear out except totally on purpose via the company no longer supporting it. This makes growing and making money as a software company a bit easier. If you can keep market share as the default option for most office software, you basically print money by not doing anything to fuck that up. If you’re selling a product, you have to keep the costs down while not losing either quality or market share. It’s not impossible, but harder.
It does, but the downside is that your entire industry can be commoditized by a few people (fewer than people think) or completely destroyed by your competition exiting the market and just releasing their product. Effectively every area Borland was monetizing 30 years ago is completely free now.
Yeah, microsoft's product doesn't wear out naturally, but the other side is, how much more could they have taxed the industry if linux didn't exist? On the other hand, open source hardware has never really gone anywhere.
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Software makes it harder and easier to make money. Profits scale a lot more. But it’s a lot harder to get to initial profitability because the competition to be the one who scales is more fierce.
In the physical world every real estate developer can make a building with positive unlevered free cash flow (harder to create a yield above capital costs but fundamentally the project will have profits).
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