Yes, ironically, a piece of software that becomes used by everybody, or at least everyone it ever might be used by, becomes worthless in the eyes of investors, because merely tracking with population growth would be seen as a sign of a dying business. This leads to self destructive behaviors as the product tries to monetize itself in unpleasant ways and expand into non-core competencies. Dropbox is an often sited example.

The evolution of a tech company into a utilities company.

What if you planned a complete software product lifecycle and create a pool of talented teams / organizational modes that can adopt stewardship of the software at various life stages with the goal to smoothly transition between stages without harming users or workers?

Lets say it looks like this for the sake of argument: stage - organizational mode - goals

    Idea / Proof of Concept - individual or team - prove the idea out
    Growth Software Product - startup - carve a space for the product, grow its useful user base to a target number, transition to Utility
    Utility Software Product - utility - maintain the project and optimize costs and delivered value, transition back up to Growth or down to Archived
    Archived Software Product - library / anthropology - tell the story of the project, minimize costs, make it available to a wide audience, organize its community, transition back up to Utility

The idea is to have a pool of teams and organization templates where you aim to "pass the baton" between modes depending on the lifecycle stage of the software, and individual teams and orgs are rewarded based on how they meet their objectives including delivering a seamless transition to the next stage.

That's very well thought out. Sadly feels overly aspirational when just "keeping the lights on" is often underrated and neglected in many companies. Maybe eventually a good business will have the foresight to think of their organization in terms of different lifecycle stages.

Thanks. I agree that today's profit-oriented organizations are generally unsuited to act out this kind of product-centric methodology. Maybe future nonprofits or DAOs or something could pull it off.

>merely tracking with population growth would be seen as a sign of a dying business

If this isn't a perversion within capitalism I don't know what is. Heck, a market failure of capitalism itself.

"There's nothing worse than making something everybody uses."

What about Facebook. They have over 2 billion accounts supposedly and Wall Street still invests in them (ignoring this past week).

> (ignoring this past week)

How can you ignore this past week when this past week is _directly related_ to their account growth falling off a cliff because of the exact over-saturation of the market we're discussing here?

Yes, they're not valued on making $10 billion per year. That P/E means it would take 24 years to make your money back. They're valued so highly because they're growing and it's expected that in ten years, it'll $30 billion per year, cutting your return time. If growth ends, then this overvaluation corrects itself.

24 years to earn your money back works out to a 2.9% annual rate of return, which is a little bit above both the 20 and 30 year treasury yields (~2.23%), reflecting a small but positive risk premium for a big blue-chip company that is generally seen as a low-risk investment.

This looks like another example of how low interest rates cause stock valuations to run up until their long-term yields end up only slightly higher than bond yields. Investors expecting that rapid growth to continue might be disappointed.

Zero-Interest rate policy explains the world

https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world

When companies aren't growing explosively they're worth (looks at INTC) 10 P/E. If AAPL hit their ceiling they'd be overpriced by 2.8X. (Hand-waving away dividend and buyback differences)