It's ten years later and software really did eat the world

In 2011, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote an essay entitled 'Software Is Eating The World'. In it, he described how emerging companies built on software were swallowing up whole industries and disrupting previously dominant household names.

It's worth revisiting his essay to see how startlingly prescient it was. At the time, the internet was pervasive, the iPhone was four years old, Facebook had closer to 1 billion users and Netflix was streaming 8 billion hours of content per year. So it seemed like everything had already changed - that the future was already here.

Since then, the disruption wrought by software has compounded. Traditional markets and companies have been almost completely disrupted by software. Basically every company is software based or has a software intensive strategy (those that do not may just fade out).  

No longer a cost centre for business, software delivers productivity and innovation. Things that aren't software are becoming software (think about that the next time you start your car). The companies that produce and sell products are now selling software (even books and movies are now consumed as software). In every market, the leading company is, or is likely in a short period of time to be, a software company. We can expect that wide cloud adoption, the emergence of AI, and future gains from quantum computing will simply accelerate these trends even further.    

Re-reading Marc's essay now, in 2022, is a tangible lesson in the pace of digital change. Not that any of it is easy.  As he says: "No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult."