Marc Andreessen was a prominent figure in the early internet era, creating some of the earliest web browsers, including Netscape and Mosaic, which he authored. In recent years, he’s weighed in on subjects including AI — but it was his comments on software that really summarised how technology evolved during the early 21st century.
“Software is eating the world.”
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Andreessen was running his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, when he published his era-defining essay in the Wall Street Journal.
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The essay highlighted the dramatic shifts underway across the economy, with Andreessen centering his argument on the observation that software companies were poised to take over longstanding industries via the massive shift among consumers to online and digital spaces.
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One example he highlighted was a misstep by the book retailer Borders, which closed all its US stores in 2011. In 2001, it handed over its online business to Amazon because, he argued, it saw online book sales as “non-strategic and unimportant”.
Well, as Andreessen put it, “oops.” He then highlighted Amazon’s role as a software company with a core engine capable of selling virtually everything online.
Dog eat dog
In the cut and thrust of business over hundreds of years, there have been wave after wave of revolution, with new technologies overhauling and refreshing the landscape. Many businesses have persisted by adapting and pivoting, but the rapid proliferation of software over the last 30 years is now threatening to give way to an entirely new era.
Andreessen highlighted that, in 2011, the stock market “actually hates technology”, and there’s an argument to make that the stock market has once again turned its back on some of the biggest software giants, with AI threatening to make them redundant.
A few years on, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, even built on the idea that the Netscape co-founder set out 15 years ago by suggesting that “AI is going to eat software”.
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