Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World

You can pick at Marc's words as much as you like, but having heard his visions back in '95 when Netscape was big, he's a big picture guy and is seeing the forest for the trees.<p>Consider the following:<p>- In this decade and the last, software engineer consistently ranks in the top ten best jobs<p>- During the financial crash, software engineers enjoyed the least turmoil and the quickest recovery compared to almost all other sectors<p>- Software is mission critical to almost every business in the world now, regardless of sector<p>- Our jobs tend to have the highest pay among the majority of jobs (again, top ten)<p>I'm with Marc. I'll double down on software right now...it's not going away.

This is actually one of the things we consciously look for: companies that are turning businesses that didn't use to be software businesses into software businesses.

As they say in the financial world, "He's talking his book."<p>That said, much of what he says is spot on. Software is creeping into everything. Education seems obvious. Health Care will be more difficult. A lot of the change will happen in the US.<p>If we can't invest money, we still can invest our careers.

"And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!""<p>Oh, I bet you can.

"Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming."<p>I can't wait for the revolution to come to the control and automation industry. I can see the heritage and legacy of the (software) tools I have to use, and unfortunately they aren't so old as to have a unix heritage but to have been born in the windows 95 era.<p>Probably I just need to pony up and get the real good high end shit, but the automation industry is ripe for disruption like health care too. the problem is the market is small and the stakes are high, so we end with old, expensive, tried, true, ancient solutions.<p>/rant

While I don't really agree with Marc's take on what's going on with current tech valuations, he hit on one extremely important point, and about it he is spot-on.<p>There is a major crisis coming in this country if the gap in skills and quality education continues to widen. Too many manufacturing jobs are moving overseas while high-tech jobs are expanding at unforeseen rates. I worry a lot about what's going to happen, and as controversial as it may sound, I think we may see a day in the not-too-distant future where the minimum wage is done away with.<p>As for Marc's commentary, it seems to me that every significant example he cited was related to content disruption (communications, entertainment, etc.). So I think a more accurate theme would have been "Why Software is Eating the Entertainment Industry."

&#62;And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!"<p>Not true. People were conscious, as early as 1997 that the dot-com bubble was just that. It didn't stop an unsustainable rise in valuations.

The cat is out of the bag! What the technologists have known all along! The market is huge, and mushrooming. Only the largest tech companies can keep pace with the growth, and there is still a-plenty for today's startups. Get yours today. Seriously!<p>Even already-connected markets, like the USA and Europe, will mature impressively as more people get better at using an improving internet. And by the time the entire living world is connected, birth rates alone will sustain satisfiable market growth.<p>How's that for a pitch?

It's not just about who will build the software, it's about who will use the software.<p>The way I see it, we're on the edge of going post-material. The trend is that the proportion of the population involved in the manufacture and distribution of physical goods is dropping. Follow that trend for a century, and you get a society where most people's jobs involve only virtual goods (although many of those goods will be turned physical by 3d printers or large bespoke manufacturing companies). Apple and google are the vanguard of the all-digital companies (apple isn't in the business of making stuff, only designing it). This means the majority of people will be making their money producing digital content, and spending it purchasing digital content. Already a sizeable portion of our income is spent on content (tv, dvd, games, books, magazines, ...). I see no reason why that trend shouldn't continue until we have a digital post-material economy.<p>And if we will have a digital economy, that means most people will be software users, producing content for others to buy. We're not just going to have to train the people that will make the software, but also the people that will use the software. I think the actual production of software will remain a small share of the economy.

Analogies limp:<p>A few centuries ago, someone may well have remarked that many of the best businesses in many industries, were moving into office buildings, an invention that was only a few decades old at the time, and that office buildings were eating the world.<p>1. They would have been right.<p>2. Moving into an office building would mean that a business was keeping up, not that it was necessarily a good business with respect to other businesses.<p>3. It would have been a good time to be building office buildings.

&#62; Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.<p>Wait... others <i>don't</i>?<p>&#62; Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached.<p>Again... do their competitors really not? How can they get anything done?

&#62; The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.<p>More likely, it's because all said software is proprietary. If people got the source code to their cars' computers, you'd see a lot more people repairing their cars (and a lot more interest in automobiles in the current generation, leading to real, open innovation in the space).<p>It's interesting to consider how cars went from being something anybody could hack on, to something that only a few "qualified" people are now able to service. I don't expect the same thing will happen with software (in other words, I don't think "trusted computing" will ever become the norm), but we must be sure that it never does if we want innovation to continue in the software space.

And herein lies the problem with patent reform.<p>The patent system is horribly broken, no doubt. But now that everything -- and I mean everything -- is turning into software, what does that mean for patents?<p>The capitalist answer is that we should let ideas freely grow and fight each other in the marketplace, but <i>having</i> an idea and <i>selling</i> an idea are two completely different skills. We will reward the salespeople, marketers, and business creators at the expense of the ideas people.<p>Perhaps that is what we want. Perhaps all ideas, not just startup business ideas, will become worthless. Execution will be the only thing that matters. If so, that's going to have some major impacts in the rest of society. It'll be interesting to watch this play out.

As someone who has been involved in software for a long time (since I was a kid), of course I love to read news like this.<p>Having said that, I noticed that in almost all Hollywood futuristic-theme movies, software (or any ground-breaking inventions that usually found with the help more advanced software/hardware) tend to cause problems that forces humans to destroy them and put humans back to the world pre-software.<p>I hope that would never happen but looking at the trend that whatever Hollywood producers imagine usually come true (even though it may take 5-10 years since the movie is out) in real life makes me scared sometime when I read news like this.

This seems inevitable, and positive. There are some friends of mine who dislike the resulting job shedding and concentration of wealth; I am not quite sure how that will shake out.<p>It will be interesting to see if today's 'software' disruptors will themselves disrupted by software. Today's revolution seems to me, a changing of the guard from the massive inefficient people-driven gatekeeper to the massive and lean software-driven gatekeeper. I wonder if the evolution of this will lead to decentralization and eventual diminution of today's usurpers?

In music its all software now, mixers, sequencers, synths are all software based. Djs use software like tracktor or serato to mix their mp3s.

An interesting article, however the trend described might be a superficial one. Replace "software" with "paper" and the same arguments could be made for the economy 100 years or more ago. That indicates that the real driving force is something more fundamental (productivity is mentioned several times here) that could result in software being replaced with something better.

It is amazing to see how far we have come. I'm so glad that I picked the right industry to get into. The world changed all around us, and we were a part of it.<p>My only fear is that this will flood the market with crapy developers. That is how this change WILL be like the DOT COM boom.

"We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses."<p>What about profit? Doesn't ignoring profit (the article only mentions it in the context of Apple despite name dropping some other wildly unprofitable businesses) sort of suggest that maybe we are in fact making at least some of the same mistakes as the last bubble?<p>"Today's largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix"<p>Netflix certainly uses a lot of software, but I think it is slightly disingenuous to paint them as a software company.

Something I noticed: he did not use Facebook as an example, while talking about Google, Linkedin, Zynga, Apple, Amazon.<p>Is there a reason?

Technology is just mimicking the rest of the economy in developed countries by moving to selling services rather than selling stuff.

Politicians support software only if it furthers the interests of others to ultimately serve their own self-interest.

Add to these the recent announcement of Foxconn to install 1000000 robots. Now software will even be eating up sweatshops. Unfortunately, the rest of the economy is slow to catch up with these changes, in both the developing and (in a smaller degree) in the developed world. For the developing world this means a slump in growth until a more educated generation grows up, for the developed world, it means slow job creation. It's not a fault of technology; governments should have seen this coming decades ago. It's a shame that still, in many countries, programming is not required in primary or secondary education.<p>Take a moment to brag and enjoy the glory. Marc is a hero and this is an inspiring piece. Now back to work...

He omitted a bigger, more central point:<p>The main drive in the economy is more productivity; the main approach there is more automation; the main approach there is computer hardware driven by software.<p>Next, the main point about software is that it be 'smart' enough to give especially valuable output. For that the main tool is math.

Well i guess this means that emotionally warped hypergeeks will truly inherit the Means of Production and run your life like a program---from cradle to grave. Fuck Marx and Engels, we have Andreesseeeeen and Zuckerberg.