[akkartik]

I think the differing stances towards tech companies might be the crucial axiomatic difference between our positions. I've just lived through 30 years of reduced regulation of Tech, and it's hard to imagine a world that reliably prevents that from recurring.

> In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.

They were approaching this from the other side, though, of already having built a ton of features and then trying to fragment a unified market. It doesn't work because from Microsoft's perspective the goal of Excel is market control at the cheapest price, and giving each user their 10% is more expensive.

But if you shift perspective to the users of Excel, you don't need to care about market control. If everyone starts out focusing on just the 10% they care about, it might be tractable to just build that for themselves. The total cost in the market is greater, particularly because I'm not imagining everyone using the same 10% is banding together in a single fork. But that becomes this totally fake metric that nobody cares about.

My approach involves throwing an order of magnitude more attention at the problem than people currently devote to computing. But a single order of magnitude feels doable and positive ROI. If everyone needs to become a programmer, that's many orders of magnitude and likely negative ROI. That's not what I'm aiming for.