Andreesen made this amazingly brilliant comment that “software is eating the world” and it’s been ringing in my head for two years.
The idea is that software is doing more and more things in more and more places changing and restructuring the world as we know it.
And I agree.
My quibble is that software is actually the side effect of the real world eater and that is hardware. The relentless increase in the number of transistors at exponentially decreasing cost is truly the world eater.
The fact that we have these machines being added at this relentless pace is what is making it possible for software to do its thing.
If we consider a transistor as a machine, we are seeing an exponential increase in machines being deployed every year. And that exponential increase is making it possible for software to go deeper and deeper into our lives. And that exponential increase is making it possible for software to do more.
We have gotten so used to that increase that it almost seems natural to be drowning in transistors.
What is making this mobile cloud transformation possible is the explosion in the number of transistors per person.
Freemium became possible because the cost of compute per person became zero.
What guarantees another equivalently large transformation in 10 years is that the current sea of transistors will be only 3-10% of the total transistors deployed in 10 years. What appears to be an infinite computational infrastructure today will look puny and irrelevant in 10 years.
This relentless increase in transistors is what makes this industry so much fun.
And although I am a software guy, it is the hardware that is eating the world…
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