<story><title>This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works</title><url>http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-one-most-important-startups-185800061.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;    Using Parse can lower your development time by 10x to 100x. Developers go from taking weeks to build an app to being able to build one and push it out in a matter of hours.
&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So here is an interesting question. If you can build an app in a matter of minutes, how much is it worth? I ask because there is often a strong correlation between economic value and the time it takes to produce something. For example, movies produced in a couple of days often have a lower economic return than movies that take months to produce. Even including pornography in that mix, sans outliers like Paris Hilton, there seems to be a strong relationship between time and value.&lt;p&gt;Presumably Parse makes the implementation stage easier, but is that for all types of App? Or is it a class of App? It would need to be the former to &apos;change the industry&apos; but what does that mean about the economic value of the industry to begin with?&lt;p&gt;Clearly this is part of a much bigger question of the economic value of &apos;Apps&apos; in general. We are evolving models based on various metrics of course, and I&apos;m curious does this &apos;destroy&apos; value or does it &apos;grow&apos; the market, or something else entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggity</author><text>You are grossly underestimating the effort it takes to find an interesting problem and then find an interesting solution.&lt;p&gt;Think of it in terms of Legos.  Parse is an automatically sorted tray of Lego pieces for you to use.  No more prickling your hand for 3 minutes while you search for that one piece -- no boilerplate.&lt;p&gt;You take a gymnasium filled with a 1000 7-year-olds and hold a contest to see who builds the coolest stuff.  No amount of tools is going to help the poor kids who can&apos;t think of interesting things to build.   On the other hand, one particularly ambitious venturist decides to build a 5-foot-tall T-Rex out of Legos.  Parse rapidly accelerates the build process by providing the stuff he needs right when he needs it.&lt;p&gt;If anything, I foresee an increase in price in the future as we see more apps that provide more value in more sectors.   App profit is not a &lt;i&gt;zero sum game&lt;/i&gt;.    The profit derived will be directly proportional to the value derived.&lt;p&gt;[TLDR] - The limiting reagent to successful apps is good problems and good solutions.  Good tools merely speed up development once you have figured those two things out.</text></comment>
<story><title>This Startup Could Literally Change The Way The Entire App Industry Works</title><url>http://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-one-most-important-startups-185800061.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&quot;    Using Parse can lower your development time by 10x to 100x. Developers go from taking weeks to build an app to being able to build one and push it out in a matter of hours.
&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So here is an interesting question. If you can build an app in a matter of minutes, how much is it worth? I ask because there is often a strong correlation between economic value and the time it takes to produce something. For example, movies produced in a couple of days often have a lower economic return than movies that take months to produce. Even including pornography in that mix, sans outliers like Paris Hilton, there seems to be a strong relationship between time and value.&lt;p&gt;Presumably Parse makes the implementation stage easier, but is that for all types of App? Or is it a class of App? It would need to be the former to &apos;change the industry&apos; but what does that mean about the economic value of the industry to begin with?&lt;p&gt;Clearly this is part of a much bigger question of the economic value of &apos;Apps&apos; in general. We are evolving models based on various metrics of course, and I&apos;m curious does this &apos;destroy&apos; value or does it &apos;grow&apos; the market, or something else entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxwell</author><text>I think more powerful tools yield different apps, not just the same apps in less time. Because of the process of human design, I doubt we&apos;ll have solid, robust, lasting &lt;i&gt;apps&lt;/i&gt; built &quot;in a matter of hours&quot;, but potentially more and better version 1&apos;s.&lt;p&gt;Development aside, designing, testing, marketing, etc. seem to take a certain fixed amount of thought, discussion, and reflection. So it might still take a few weeks or months to build a great app, but in that time, you could experiment more. Going from, say, days to minutes to build certain &lt;i&gt;features&lt;/i&gt; would be incredibly valuable. You could try things you never would&apos;ve had time for otherwise, and end up with apps that wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve even been possible with other tools.</text></comment>