Any time you hear “this time it’s different”, you should probably run for the hills, but I think Anshu Sharma makes an interesting point in his comment on Chris Dixon’s post about “full stack startups”:
This is also why “this time its different” is true. For the first time (as far as I can tell) in the life of silicon valley we are no longer competing with each other for the same $1 Trillion Dollar IT budget - Microsoft vs Oracle vs IBM vs Juniper vs AppDynamics vs Hadoop vs New Relic vs whatever. We are competing with Starwood Group vs AirBnB, Uber vs Yellow Cab, etc. In the past, only ecommerce companies did that. This expands the [total accessible market] for Silicon Valley (or “tech” whatever that means) from $1Trillion to N Trillion.
It’s interesting to consider that many of today’s prominent startups don’t compete with each other at all – except for employees. Uber and Square are in totally different markets.