That Thin Layer Between Technology and Entrepreneurship

If we're on a trend of software eating the world, I wonder how technology will shape entrepreneurship in the future. I have an intuition that in the future web applications will become the most common vehicle of entrepreneurship in general. This isn't to say that all new businesses will be technology companies, but they will involve technology and web applications. The driver for this is simple: the internet offers too many advantages for new businesses vs. other modes of distribution. Whereas the path used to be to create the product or service and market it to your local geographic area, the future path will be to create a web app to support your product or service and market it online.

Right now the only barrier for entrepreneurs to do this is the thin layer of technical knowledge needed to spin up a simple web app, and this layer is getting thinner and thinner. Standard web frameworks and API's-as-a-service make it nearly (but not quite) dead simple for a non-technical person to set up a rails app, make it look professional with a CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, collect credit cards with Stripe, manage e-mail collection and management with Mailchimp, and handle deployment with Heroku

Two areas where I see opportunity in this area are in removing the last remaining gaps in that (already thin) technology barrier, and in increasing the depth of what you get without technical knowledge. I see IFTTT driving the latter: by helping people create 'recipes' hooking together APIs from around the internet, they help increase the depth of what's possible for non-technical people on the web. They are essentially a programming language for non-programmers. It's a great increase of depth of what you can do as a non-technical person without any programming (though I don't think they seem themselves as targeting non-technical entrepreneurs specifically). 

There are lots of individual companies going for APIs-as-a-service to help with the 'removing technical barrier' problem, but I'm not sure I see anyone going for closing it holistically. Some companies have created closed-source versions (like Etsy or eBay storefronts) or a temporary, raise-initial-cash version (like Kickstarter or CrowdTilt). The only thing I see coming close are MOOCs and resources like rails apps on how to build your own rails-app-with-X-feature. But that's a long way from completing the circuit. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a company work to completely close this circuit in an open source way in the near future.

What would happen if we could close this thin layer completely, and if the depth of what you get without technical knowledge got bigger? I think you could see a fundamental shift in the number of online companies and entrepreneurs. As soon as you create a way for people to create a web app that supports up to the first few hundred (or thousand) customers without any technical knowledge, you could fundamentally lower the barrier of entrepreneurship to include everyone that has a great ideas but doesn't have the technical connections, knowledge, or ability to put it online. It's going to be a small incremental shift once it arrives, but I think it'll be a step function increase once it does.