| Most of those benefit by: - Geographically-limited servicing areas. Your online paper store can sell around the world. Your plumber's got to get to the house. - Constraints on throughput. Service jobs take time. They respond poorly to capital, automation, scaling, pre-fabrication, or other efficiency techniques, all of which are already optimised. The additional input is skill, which takes time to accumulate. - Hands-on. A plumber or roofer can't be downloaded, nor can you drop-ship your plumbing or roofing problem to a service centre in the next state or around the world. Work happens at the site itself. (This is strongly similar to but distinct from the first point.) - Reputation. Service work is difficult to assess, and indicia of quality include years in business, word-of-mouth, and local reputation, again, factors which take time to develop. - Limited opportunities within a given region. Because only so many professionals can be supported, the ones who do achieve a good reputation tend to crowd out competitors. It's difficult to break into a market. These "simple ideas" all face strong bounds on scaling or wide-area provisioning. Within a local region, accumulated skill and reputation form a strong basis for a reliable business with predictable annual revenues (if some seasonal variability). Simple ideas without the scaling constraints mentioned are far harder to break into as the competition is at a global scale. Even a strongly enthusiastic user-base (DuckDuckGo) or tech-giant backing (Bing, to repeat the example, or Google+) doesn't guarantee a sizeable market share. |