Why Software is Eating The World? An essay written 6 years ago by Marc Andreessen stated th
at “every company needs to become a software company”. Co-author of Mosaic the first widely used browser and co-founder of Netscape the pioneer internet browser that the first generation of internet users used even before Internet Explorer ever saw the light of day; (the days way before Chrome, Firefox and Safari) Andreessen, now of Andreessen Horowitz a mega successful Venture Capitalist from Silicon Valley, in his seminal Wall Street Journal was bringing attention to the fact that business’s leveraging internet technology through the development of software were already the biggest companies in the world and there were more on their way. Changing the face of the way business was being done and would be done forever more.
Jeetu Patel’s TechCrunch article on ‘Software still eating the world’ quoting Andreessen illustrates in his case studies on Netflix, Uber, Airbnb how these new essentially software company’s rode on the back of now established software platforms, but focused on their core idea of how they wanted provide a better solution to the end user, rather than starting from scratch and get caught up with being a technology company.
Netflix is now the most used as a lead example of how a dynamic business has transformed itself from shipping cd’s, to streaming content, which made them a technology service provider to now creating the content themselves, that now rivals other Movie Studios who have all the analytics of its subscribers online.
Uber’s founded in 2009 and Airbnb’s founded in 2008 growth is on them utilising mobile, Google Maps, Amazon Web Services and the App store. So rather coming up with the technology themselves as the technology itself developed were able to look at how they could provide a better service than was available before.
Marc Andreessen based in Silicon Valley through his own vantage point of a tech pioneer/guru, already had his own journey to reflect on when he stated software was eating the world, and with the Google’s, Facebook’s, and Youtube’s making their mark almost half a generation after him. With development of Artificial Intelligence, advanced robotics and the Internet of things impacting the manufacturing process; it’s definitely not far fetched to assume that whatever business you’re in it is about to be disrupted through the use of technology. So should you be developing some software to disrupt your own business, industry or service.