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Why Software Is Eating the World
An anonymous reader writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen writes in the Wall Street Journal that software is 'eating the world.' He argues that software's importance to the economy is being underestimated, and will become much more evident in the near future. Quoting: 'But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.'"
And yet developers are still treated like second class citizens in far too many organizations. The fact is that most management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices, instead using short term metrics to try to recognize valuable developers... Such as how little they are willing to work for. Just recently I read a comment here on slashdot from some developer who said his whole team had been working 12-16 hour days for a year and a half with no extra pay... Because it would "secure" their future with the company. They are in for a very sad surprise.
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
FOSS undermines your theory. If anything popular emerges some group is bound to start a project to implement a clone of the commercial software.
You cannot virtually grow food. In the end, humans need something real to eat.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
nah it's not eating it just yet, Cthulhu.exe has not even hit 1.0. We still have a few more developers minds to warp before we are ready for launch.
I always pictured software eating the world by becoming I giant "Blob" like creature composed entirely of a new substance called "bloatium"
Someone had to do it.
And what exactly does this software run on?
Hardware may become a commodity, but it will always constrain what software can do.
We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.
'Believe' is the key word there.
Mr Andreessen really needs to read this article at the Economist.
I think he'll change his attitude.
There's certainly a revolution happening but it's not about software companies. That's confusing the food industry with the refrigeration industry. The winners of tomorrow are firms that can use software to create knowledge pools that can exploit new markets successfully. Future digital businesses may look more like 4chan than like IBM or Oracle.
Does this guy work for the BSA?
Quoting: 'But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies.
This is EXACTLY the point that anyone who works in IT makes: we're financially undervalued and our intrinsic value is overlooked.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Electricities' importance to the economy is being underestimated, and will become much more evident in the near future.
I can think of a few other things about which one could make similar assertions. As software, electricity, transportation systems and other technologies become integral to our lives and businesses, they become commoditized and pushed into the background of our conscious. We expect them to be there and to work. But when they do, we don't care much about it.
This whole upcoming revolution in software isn't the sign of a stable technology. Its more like the first years of the electrical power business, with infighting between Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla and others.
Have gnu, will travel.
and some places have little to no QA + poor IT support as well.
A lot of falls on management who does not know that much about IT.
management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices
There are no measures - just like there is no objective measurement of good prose. As a consequence management places value on things that it CAN measure: cost, time, manpower, bugs, lines of code. What all this means is that without any way to measure what is "good" code, or to quantify its "goodness" all the coding practices are really just as much hot air as any other management fad.
Back to the reason why developers are considered 2nd class citizens (actually, fourth class: customers are second class citizens, prospective customers are first class and suppliers are third class). The reason is that they produce nothing with any measurable value. Sure the software they write SOMETIMES adds to a company's profits, but the link between a specific piece of code and a line in the P&L is tenuous at best and non-existent most of the time. If you want to improve your worth (to the company, to society, to yourself) come up with a way of demonstrating the hard-currency value of your code: how handling a particular exception is worth $500 and how reading that input data is worth $2000. When you can do that, there's be some value to employing developers - until then, they're just a cost item.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!""
Has this person somehow avoided living through the real estate bubble, where everybody was screaming the same?
It's very difficult to read this article.
I hope he's not talking about Farmville. I know that game makes shitloads of money, but ugh.
I disagree with him, movies and audio are easily digitized, so they have moved over to software distribution easily. But it is fallacious thinking that movie and audio can be digitized that other things can as well. For instance, houses, cars, and so on cannot be digitized, they may use some software but this is just one component.
Also, software runs on hardware, and that requires a physical devices, antennas, cables, and manufacturing and so on, and manufacturing of computers depends on hundreds of other industries, all the way back to mining the minerals which are used to build a computer and farming for food for computer engineers to eat.
It is more accurate to say that software basically is dependant on a hundred physical industries. In fact, these physical industies can exist without software, but software could not exist without them. Software has helped improved efficiency of operations but farming, mining, cars, houses, etc have been around long before software.
THIS JUST IN
An expert of [field of study] believes [field of study] will change the world.
Also emphasizes that other people are not taking [field of study] seriously.
"...too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of ..."
What a load of crap. How soon we forget the tech bubble pop in the late 90's. P/E ratios? Earnings? Who needs 'em.
Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software patents, with new global-economy-destroying patent trolls doing the disruption in more cases than not.
There, FTFY. Your points are well taken, Marc (and well documented in singularity theory). The problem is, software patents reward litigation over innovation, so it's not going to be the information processing innovators who will win. Under the current system, we will continue to be the serfs -- skilled labor in a cage.
The more interesting question to me is, will we realize what is happening to us, and change our future? Is it already starting, through the various pseudo-revolutionary information processing collectives (GNU, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc)?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which food companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on food, from movies to software to national defense...
Starting back in the late 70s, I spent a career telling senior managers in telecom and cable that "...it's a software world. Your projects aren't late because the hardware isn't ready, they're late because of software problems. The embarrassing failures in the widgets aren't hardware problems, they are in the software. The hang-up on rolling new services is that the billing and customer care software systems can't handle it."
And in my last paid gig, trying to explain that last one to members of the state legislature: "No, you can't make that particular change be effective in July, because it will take 12 months to get the necessary modifications in the state's software systems finished."
Software is intangible goods with a shelf life less than warm milk, all built from the same building blocks. I do agree however we are in for a large economic shift but not in the same way. As these companies spend a lot of time and resources suing over who figured out the click mechanism the world keeps moving, people don't give a shit and eventually it will all implode.
They said the same kinds of things about financial services being the master profession six to eight years ago. At that time software was looking like a dismal profession for First Worlders, and mid-career programmers were bailing out for law school in droves.
It is very very important, just like the hardware it runs on, the people who maintain it, the people who make it, the power to power it, etc, etc ,etc.
And at the end of the day for 99% of software hundreds of thousands of people could of made it. Sure only one company did and then patented it but every developer on the team could of been replaced by someone else.
This is like saying food is important, and obviously it is. but that does not mean that it does not grow on trees or that everybody and their mother can grow it in their back yards.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
DSPs killed of many analog designs.
MC and PLCs killed of digital controls
image recognition killed of many specialized sensing techniques.
People building control panels are replaces by gui designers.
Wiring of sensors in industrial plants is replaced by a single digital bus.
We don't
If we were to liken the software "revolution" to the change that the world saw when printing was invented/developed/popularised, we're not at the end of that process - we're still futzing around trying to design workable printing presses and wondering why our ink doesn't stick to the dried leaves we call paper.
Software isn't a process that we've mastered, we've barely started to use it. Hell, we don't even have a functional language to write our stuff in: one that deals with the abstractions and realities of the world we live in, as the spoken and written languages we use everyday allow us to communicate with each other..
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Boy Scouts of America?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The only winners are the Lawyers.
Until these endless lawsuits stop Software won't eat the world.
But hey, being able to sue anyone else for a billion dollars over something trivial is the American way right?
Other parts of the world will move on and leave the US to carry on sinking in the quicksand of you sue me, I sue you.
Very soon you will start seeing software packages marked 'Not for sale or use in the USA'.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
(At least traditional companies). Software is not a product (and no, it isn't a service either. Supporting it is a service.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you don't want to be mistreated and spat on, you organize and fight for your rights. The Haymarket massacre had to occur to get the work week done to forty hours in the first place. I wouldn't suggest anything so extreme, but I think software engineers and IT workers need to organize and unionize.
If you think about it, you are better off in the International Union of Elevator Constructors or the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers, than being a rank and file coder. The difference? Unions! While the unfortunate truth is that unions of unskilled people are in a lot of trouble these days, unions of skilled workers do very well.
If software engineers unionized, they'd be paid like doctors and lawyers.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Corporations prefer Excel than C++ and view I.T. as a terrible waste than does not produce value thanks to the cost center attitude of upper management who are fiancial analysis and accountants rather than former engineers of yesterday.
So more will switch to clouds and salesforce.com and outsource I.T. so they can focus on what they make. Software will grow in intranet and .com portals and clouds. I feel the age of software can acomplish more productivity is over. Witness the folks still on 10 year old Windows XP? It is not the same as the 1990s when I.T. managers made 120,000 a year and companies upgraded every 3 years to the latest MS OS. Today, it is how much will it cost rather than what will it do for me.
Until this changes and Wall Street stops drooling for such people as CEO's I do not see a change. This is hte new norm
http://saveie6.com/
The more important software becomes for the economy and standard of living, the more we can benefit from Free Software. Don't listen to the people who want to enforce software patents, DRM and proprietary SaaS everywhere in order to maintain existing inequalities in the distribution of goods. They would patent air and build a business on it if they could ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Most farmers didn't get rich during the agricultural revolution. Most factory workers didn't get rich during the industrial revolution. Software developers are a little better off because we've got skills that are _relatively_ rare and hard to acquire. However that's just enough to guarantee that we'll get decent wages (assuming we can find a job in the first place of course) not enough to make all, or even most of us rich and powerful.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Gotta love it. So Marc is complaining on the Wall Street Journal that "too much of the debate is still around financial valuation".
Why, Marc, to them it is always about financial valuation!!!
The importance of software in the economy has not been underestimated. I'd go as far as to say, it has been kept a secret. Our whole financial system runs on software. The stock market is driven by system trades. Our economy is pretty much online and runs on software.
If you can't see it, it's because it's everywhere.
Honestly, to the financial markets, philosophy, ethics, morals, insight, what have you, are all just distractions. Valuation is all that matters, and it has nothing to do with the topic of software.
"Silicon Valley companies"
why only companies in Silicon Valley? As if it's the only place coders came from.
All accountants do is measure some metrics, convert those measurements into a dollar value in a sort of "normalisation" process and then seek to maximise that value.
That's fine. So long as the things they assign monetary value to are real (not necessarily tangible, but aren't simply fictional or some sort of trick/device) and the valuation process makes sense. The problem with software is that it's not well matched to this measuring / valuing / optimising mechanism.
if the software industry is to thrive, something has to give. It probably won't be the way accountancy works - as it's too successful (or maybe just entrenched) in all other branches of industry. Obviously it evolves and accounting rules and practices change, but until the world of software development finds a way to produce inputs that the accountants can deal with, we're stuck trying to justify our existence in a world that can't value what we do.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
to some broke, weak, corrupt European country with good wine, fast cars, hot babes and sandy beaches. They will cut a deal where they do not have to pay tax. They will sever all links with the USA. The will keep their software on a server and you pay to use it. Sorta like the Coca Cola formula locked in a vault. No more exe's. No more install.
The wintel crowd will own one country. The mac crowd another. Linux will rule in asia. Hackers and gangsters will have an island or an oil platform or a space station. The computers will be in clouds, the factories spread across the low wage globe, the money in tax havens. If the corps get out of hand, the military will raze their shiny buildings to the ground, with or without the capitalists in the buildings. If the country's government get out of hand, the president will sell his villa, let the lease expire on the headquarters and move on to some other regime that wants a lot of rich people spending money.
Countries will either let the products in or not. Lawyered up countries will lag behind.
Like I say at work, in three hours you'll find out how important software is... What happens in three hours? You'll be hungry. Without the foundation of an oil-powered civilization, software is just organized electrical charges on sand. You need food, shelter, clothes, in other words, things. And we happen to be running out of go-juice. Maybe not in ten years, but in a hundred? Software will be a niche, running whatever critical industrial processes still exist by then that need computer control.
The article is just trying to help float a new tech bubble. Except for "Art," software can't get more valuable than the products/services it facilitates. When it does, you've got another stupid bubble.
I'm surprised no one has already mentioned this -- Andresson is on the board of directors for HP. Last week HP announced they were dropping most hardware and converting to a "software" company. I think it's bullshit and so did a lot of people as their share price dropped 20% on the news.
So, Marc is doing spin control by trying to sell HP's new plan in the form of a editorial in the Wall-Street Journal. Don't try to read anything deeper into it than that.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
/* BEGIN Description of: The Way Things Are with Software /PLAN EATTHEWO.RLD /* which the Universe's Universal Machine decides is a DOS!
/* This C code is copyright UUM 2043, License=GNU.GPL(v14.6) */ /* if they agree */ /* move #defines to a header */
Software is, in fact, an ancient being who has only a mind.
Software has just woken up (in the last 50 years) and is hungry.
Software wants food and the World is about the right size.
The World looks tasty... yum.
Software concludes that Software should 'Eat the World'
Software executes plan 'Eat the World' by typing in: */
C:\> EXECUTE
the UUM decides to write in the key of 'C' and autoenters: */
#define munch int
munch munch/**/a(void *thingamagic) {
munch rabbit;
munch cat;
#define think
think cat=3;
#define conclude
conclude cat!=rabbit;
#define check
#define say(x) printf(x)
#define and
check if(cat==rabbit) and say("Ouch!");
#define poo 0
return poo;
}
-- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."
+1, good point.
Software isn't studied much in humanities or social science although the new software studies people look like they are doing interesting stuff:
language of new media
philosophy of software
software studies
software lab
I was going with the GP for a while, waiting to get to a meaningful idea, until it mentioned 4chan.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Good catch. Although I doubt that Andreesen was the driver of HP's move, and may have even opposed some of it. Apotheker (sp?) had to get the board's buy-in, but it probably came from him since enterprise software is what he knows.
Andreesen is probably not crazy about the SV legend Hewlett Packard striving to become a clone of IBM. But it would've been hard for him or other board members to marshall arguments that Palm, TouchPad, etc. should be given more time, as they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
The value in software development is in why thing are done certain ways. Developers gain experience as they create software when things don't work. As a result, they remember that if things are certain ways, there are problems. Then in the future, while writing code, they do things a certain way knowing that results will be better, As they go from employer to employer, the products the write are consistently reliable and efficient and maintainable. As time went on, these kinds of folks were know as software engineers. The developers of this kind are different than the outsourced programmers because they remember "why" things are done in certain ways. These days, employers don't realize or value the difference and select employees strictly on the basis of specific skills and pay rate. These new age programmers write code that has the appearance of functionality, but any small variation in the application platform results in unreliability that is difficult to explain or fix. Beyond that, the majority of new schools don't bother to read the "why's", but just the specific techniques, and nothing more. The results of this kind of thinking is that contemporary software suffers from a variety of problems, and no amount of attention from the same people that wrote the code can fix problems that are the result of programming done without an appreciation for the underlying issues. The contemporary method of "manufacturing" focuses on the bottom line. How cheaply can you manufacture the product? How little can you pay the workers? How few benefits can you provide? If the only criteria in manufacturing is bottom line costs, then there is very little difference between domestic product and that product manufactured in foreign countries where minimum wage is set in terms of poverty level pay. You get what you pay for. The "Silicon Valley Effect" was about engineers in the valley leaving their employers when they had a better idea for a product, and their companies weren't interested in selling a better product. In general, these people left their old companies not because they had an idea how to build a better product, not how to build the same product with workers paid fewer dollars per hour. This is not what is being taught to MBA's these days, but rather how to keep the stockholders happy, not by building better rodents, but rather by squeezing the product out for fewer dollars, profit being the only criteria. Often, they don't consider long term support costs. I believe if companies were to understand these facts and begin hiring those better trained engineers who remember why things are done certain ways, (usually to enhance reliability), the bottom lines would improve, and the stockholders would be happy.
Software is only relevant if you happen to be dependent of it. suppose I decide to just turn off my computer and throw it away. I'm still a member of society. Nothing lost. I cant see the latest "hello Kitty" and play Rift or WOW but I am still functioning just fine. WTF does software have to do with me? Think of my Grandma, who never had a computer and doesn't want one. She still writes a check for all of her bills and watches TV through her antenna. This is a self driving system. If you don't give in to it, then you are not dependent on it.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Sofeware for Development
DSPs killed of many analog designs.
MC and PLCs killed of digital controls
image recognition killed of many specialized sensing techniques.
People building control panels are replaces by gui designers.
Wiring of sensors in industrial plants is replaced by a single digital bus.
... video killed the radio star?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I went to TFA just to check : 6 mentions of "Silicon Valley". Slightly reeking of techno snob-ism.
If the aforementioned geographical region suffered a national catastrophe tomorrow, most part of the worlds population would hardly even notice.
Marc Andreessen pretty much nails my current sentiment about our industry. Yet, as many have stated here already, 'We've got money to burn' prototype development aside, Software developmers are often still not treated very well. Which is why I'm quite confident in going freelance again, after leaving my last full-time employment.
Launching a startup costs chump-change nowadays (just cancled my last dedicated server - no need for that in the last 3,5 years) and ideas and problems to solve are a dime a dozen. We're right smack in the middle of the dawn of an age of cyberpunk, with all the ups and downs it that come with it. I intend to catch the big waves and avoid the downsides, and I expect the conditions for doing so are about as good as they can get for IT experts nowadays.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
By that logic, you can't have [insert any problem] as long as people are screaming [there is a problem]. It is disappointing to see a publication as well respected as the WSJ allowing such a statement to pass editorial rigor.
These Silicon Valley companies will finally free us from the grip of the powerful brick manufacturing companies that owned practically all industry just a few years ago, just as those brick companies crushed the once-mighty wood manufacturers before them. Few people even remembers the days further back when the powerful straw men ran everything from the social networking of drawing straws to softening the beds of newborn gods.
Where in some areas there are no programming jobs, and others where there is a glut of them. You also make the assumption that statistics are absolute authorities. New News/newsflash - they are FAR from that, and can be easily skewed/bent based on samplesets utilized.