Software is still eating the world

[Love Pulse]

Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software Is Eating the World” essay in The Wall Street Journal five years ago. Today, the idea that “every company needs to become a software company” is considered almost a cliché. No matter your industry, you’re expected to be reimagining your business to make sure you’re not the next local taxi company or hotel chain caught completely off guard by your equivalent of Uber or Airbnb. But while the inclination to not be “disrupted” by startups or competitors is useful, it’s also not exactly practical.

It is decidedly non-trivial for a company in a non-tech traditional industry to start thinking and acting like a software company. This is why the companies we most associate with “Why Software Is Eating the World” now are startups, with a few notable exceptions (like GE). Ultimately, there is no blueprint for how to make this transition, but I do think there are two principal lessons or starting points that can be learned from companies that have succeeded most over the last five years: timing and focus.

Timing is everything
It’s important to appreciate just how prescient Andreessen’s idea was in 2011. At the time, the internet was pervasive. Amazon had been around for a decade, the iPhone was four years old and the App Store was three years old, doing $ 2.5 billion in revenue for millions of developers. Facebook had 845 million users, and Netflix was streaming 2 billion hours of content each quarter. Most people would have said we were finally fully immersed in the technology era and that the internet had changed everything. In other words, the future was here.

And, as Marc predicted, they would have been very wrong. As he put it:

“Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”

Uber was founded in 2009 and launched its service in 2010. Outside of a small but loyal community of riders and the local airport limo drivers in San Francisco, few people knew what Uber was in 2011, and no one was participating in endless conversations about “ Uber for X. ”Similarly, Airbedandbreakfast.com (later to be renamed Airbnb) was founded in 2008, but only reached 1 million listings in 2014. Today, it's hard to imagine getting around in busy cities without these two services.

What Uber and Airbnb - like Andreessen - understood about “software eating the world” was that incredible innovations often emerge at just these moments when it looks like everything has been changed and we’ve reached the new normal. Uber and Airbnb saw the world of the cloud, the iPhone, the App Store, AWS and Google Maps, and said to themselves, “it’s not about what can we do now, but better; it’s about what can we do now that was simply not possible until today. ”It’s that discontinuous leap - supported by the rise of new platforms - that led to a company dismantling the transportation industry or reimagining hospitality.

Netflix - while far from a startup in 2011 - is also an interesting case. They started by shipping DVDs to people’s homes so that people could watch movies without having to live through the hassle of making a trip to Blockbuster, then evolved into providing streaming movies in the comfort of people’s homes.

Like Uber and Airbnb, Netflix looked around at the platforms and infrastructure available to them (first the USPS, then broadband internet) and asked what they could do on top of those platforms that either no one had thought of (shipping DVDs) or had previously been unfeasible. In 2013 they took the discontinuous leap from technology provider and service to content creator.

Now they think of themselves far more as a movie studio like HBO that creates original programming, albeit one with a vast and unique understanding of viewing behavior derived from the analytics of its subscriber base.

[Phunk]

Well yes, technology and advancement has always been the pinnacle of human capability , It will always push the boundaries of our human knowledge . and evetually in the neat future, create the undoubtedly utopia . so yeah, great essay from Marc Andreessen . really love it .