What is in this whole universe of previously non-viable software?

People naively assume that there should be a number of big, obvious use cases.

But most big obvious examples are big enough to already be viable in today's laws of physics.

People then erroneously conclude that most software that creates value is viable today.

But that's not necessarily correct!

Imagine that most of the things that are not viable are in the long, thick tail of software.

This tail of software is "situated software": hyper bespoke and niche.

Let's imagine, for sake of argument, that the universe of imaginable situated software is orders of magnitude larger in terms of total value for humans than the subset of viable software today.

But let's further imagine that every individual point of value in this universe is smaller than existing viable apps today.

If they were larger, then someone would have already made an app for it today!

In this case, each individual use case you demonstrated from that situated software universe would look unimpressive, and yet the amount of cumulative value would still be massive.

Even if a swarm is massive, if it is made up of uniformly small, long-tail use cases, it won't look like anything when enumerated as a concrete series of use cases.

I believe that today we are missing an invisible and massive long-tail of software.

There are massive previously unexplored regions of the universe to explore!

This software will be small and situated. Instead of being internally very complex, it will plug into other bits of software around itself, as part of an emergent, flexible whole.

Contrast that to software today, which is little expensive, highly designed islands.