Entrepreneurs in the digital era

Thinking about starting an entrepreneurial venture? On my personal blog,Mike Dorsey.info, I follow Paul Graham's observations, and I argue that it is a lot easier than ever before. Does that make internet startups a commodity? An entrepreneur myself, I prefer not to think about myself as a 'commodity' just yet, but I understand the point. Could we say that entrepreneurs are still exciting, and the commoditification won't happen for a few years?

Well, on the other hand, we not get carried away here...this whole 'entrepreneurship is now possible for anyone!' thing might be limited to industries that have actually gone topsy-turby by the net revolution...it might not be affecting every industry at all. We could argue that the net is only changing some industries and others remain firmly stable. I wonder, in how many industries do web 2.0 innovations and the low-barrier-to-entry online marketplaces have a relevant voice? Is the web threatening auto-makers, or plastics companies? Surely, but not so much as print classifieds, right?

But what do you think? Are we just getting starry-eyed about the net and forgetting all of the other industries that still require a lot of up-front capital investment, institutional support, long product development life-cycles, etc? Or is there a permanent shift underway that will affect businesses of every kind?

Well, whatever the case, these past 15 years or so are seminal moments in the evolution labor, technology, and commercial markets. If they don't already, school textbooks (or rather, ireaders) will have to spend a good chunk of time teaching kids how ubiquitous computers, internet connections, and open source programming movements made a digitally-based economy explode and leave a path of destruction in its wake (phone systems and snail mail, newspapers and classifieds, radio, movie theaters, mapmaking, etc)