The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time.
Movie studios forget this all the time. Book publishers and TV networks often seem to forget this. A lot of folks looking to do startups forget this as well.
I don't know. Michael followed that sentence with the following:
"Similarly, if you’re a programmer, you’re probably perfectly capable of writing Facebook or the Google search engine or Twitter or a browser, and you certainly could churn out Tetris or Angry Birds or Words with Friends or Farmville or any of hundreds of enormously successful programs. There’s little value in doing so, though, and that’s the point – in the Internet age, software has close to zero cost of replication and massive network effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates."
The problem with this: there are TONS of examples in the software world where the first mover DOESN'T dominate.
That said, I enjoyed reading this job post. It might be the best job post I've ever read.
I agree with you about the movie studios, but I think Abrash overstated his point a little.
There is certainly value in taking someone else's idea and making it better. "Everything is a remix" and all that.
Perhaps not as much value as the original idea, but it isn't non-existent. Google certainly didn't invent search, but they did do it better (for a while).
Movie studios forget this all the time. Book publishers and TV networks often seem to forget this. A lot of folks looking to do startups forget this as well.