[jasonkester]

I think you missed the point of the analogy.

The "Miners" in this scenario are all the companies trying to cash in on the dot com boom. There are thousands of them, and only 14 are going to make it big.

Those thousands of companies will burn through tens of millions of consulting hours. Consider those hours to be picks, and hopefully you'll start to see what the analogy means.

If you sell 2000 hours of consulting this year, you're guaranteed to be ahead somewhere between 100k and 300k, depending on your rate. If you instead spend those hours building the next Twitter, chances are very good you'll end the year with nothing at all.

Just like 90% of the people who headed off to the Yukon with a shiny new pick in their hand.

[maxklein]

I believe you miss the point of the analogy.

The analogy is not about people selling services to the gold diggers, it's about selling tools to the gold diggers.

The services market would be akin to the people who sell food to the miners.

[jmm]

Perhaps you're both being a bit too literal? I think what Chris is trying to say is that while it may be more obvious to pursue a consumer facing startup because of the attention they get, entrepreneurs should still keep in mind the less shiny/immediately gratifying things. Because the existence of the first set creates an opportunity for the second. Things like Heroku.

Kind of apropos... I got stuck on a trip recently without a book, and grabbed a copy of Heyday off a shelf. It's a historical fiction novel about the gold rush period and how things in CA played out. Not a terrible read, if you're into that kind of thing.

[maxklein]

What I'm saying is that the numbers don't add up. There are not 10 herokous or similar - platforms are a winner take all game. The market is also much smaller than consumer goods.

It's not clever to think there is more opportunity in selling B2B products : the market is MUCH tougher and the competition is a lot more skilled.

This gold-digger analogy is seductive because it fits in so perfectly with the programmer mindset, but look outside the bubble: most money is made in selling goods to consumers, not to businesses.

[spokey]

> There are not 10 herokous or similar

1. Salesforce's Force.com

2. Amazon's EC2

3. Google's AppEngine

4. Microsoft's Windows Azure

5. VMWare/Salesforce's VMForce

6. Makara

7. CloudBees

8. PiCloud

9. PHPFog

10. DuoStack

I'm not sure it's obvious that PaaS is "winner take all", but even if it is, right now there are several deep-pocketed companies fighting to be that winner. Sounds pretty good if you're looking for an exit.

[maxklein]

Those are not hosting the same languages as Herouku, so there is no direct competition.