Recreating the IBM PC bios, enabling clone PCs and changing the market completely?
One of the points the article makes is that copying is now essentially free. So if you spend money building something, someone else can copy it and use all the money they didn't spend marketing their version. And why license software anyway, when you can just clone it and even tweak it better towards your business cases? Will you be paying your Adobe subscription or buying the knockoff version of Photoshop?
The article gives the timeframe at a decade or more. But I think it is safe to say that when it can happen, it will happen. IBM PC popular? Clone it and get in on the profits. Flappy Birds becomes popular? Hundreds of copies get released trying to get in on the money. Wordle? Even more. Article talks about moats to stop this and how changes in IP law enforcement are eroding them. We already have AI companies complaining about competitors stealing their efforts, unable to appreciate the irony on how the models were initially created and the precedents they set. Maybe the sinophobes will be right and Deepseek just a cheap knockoff of American AI, but will you care if the price is right?
This was literally the first coding job I ever got paid to do.
I would decompile the Google browser extension to extract the hash algorithm they used to sign page rank lookup requests, rewrite it in PHP and ship it to SEOs on weird forums.
They updated the hash every few months and I made enough money to pay for some summer activities as a teen.
The work has already been done. Recreate this to be identical but just in a different programming language.
I'm going to say never.