Software Is No Longer Eating The World
In “Tech” we’ve spent a quarter of a century ‘changing the world’, and now it’s someone else's turn.
The world was our oyster
What a ride it’s been. Information technology has changed the world. It started changing business a long time ago, but now even pop culture is downstream of tech. We got memes, we got selfies, we got Soundcloud rappers, we got… The Kardashians. “IRL” has been secondary to “online” for a long time and that became official with the pandemic.
In tech we can’t remember what it was like to not have a new startup trying to be the “Uber of X” , “Airbnb of Y”, “Tinder of Z”, and now — and now the job is mostly done.
The heady days of 2011
In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote that tech would change everything “from movies to agriculture to national defense”…
“Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale….”
- Why Software Is Eating the World, Marc Andreessen
Our demand for goods, taxis, travel, sex, music, video games, is now facilitated by software. The largest plays that relied on huge economics of scale came to be known as “Big Tech”. Not all of it was pure ‘innovation’, sometimes the tech was aided by some good old fashioned labour and regulation arbitrage and a few concerns about privacy, which is fashionable to complain about but nobody actually really seemed to mind, after all these great products were mostly free or very cheap.
Overall, life became more convenient for most people. Noah Smith wrote this week that the past decade of tech …
“gave us electric cars that actually sold, smartphone cameras good enough to make professional movies, e-commerce that sustained us through the pandemic and helped create a small business boom, video conferencing and workflow apps that made remote work a reality, convenient payment apps, […] And most Americans appreciated those benefits.”
- Noah Smith, The financialization of tech
Life before the iPhone
2011 was coincidentally the year Steve Jobs died and he left behind a true legacy. As a result, to this day, we still hear tiresome lessons in business about how to be more Steve Jobs.
But the cliche is earned… it’s hard to feel now the impact that was the iPhone, but one fact should help: RIM/Blackberry execs didn’t believe that the iPhone was real when Steve Jobs revealed it on stage for the first time.
They did not believe that Apple had been able to create such an object. Remember, at the time, getting real-time email was considered pretty snazzy. The iPhone combined a good camera with a sleek multi-touch screen (and later on GPS plus the app store eco-system) and it was connected to everything all the time via cheap data plans. This yielded — and I don’t use the word lightly — a revolutionary moment that we are still experiencing.
The idea of being able to browse and engage with celebrities, taxis, restaurants, horny locals, whilst joining the global spectacle of mass social media was…. futuristic. Faster and more streamlined was the goal. And an eco-system of avid founders and techies was ready to build this new world, to eat the old one with software.
Before that point, working in ‘tech’ meant a quiet job in IT or at IBM. After that point, working in ‘tech’ meant a well-paid job where you could ‘be yourself’ and throw off the shackles of working for a real corporation and instead work for one of the new ones that had candid and refreshing values like “Don’t be evil”. It used to be nerdy and niche to be into tech, now it’s a mainstream career, it’s pretty much most white collar careers, and it’s the way that celebrities, hipsters, workers, parents, sports-clubs, politicians and criminals everywhere organise and communicate.
My anecdotal estimation is that being a ‘tech founder’ became a legit career around 2011, outside of precocious Silicon Valley anyway. At middle class dinner parties in London before that point, most people worked for the big 4 accounting firms, the Magic Circle, in consulting, the City, or politics. Suddenly having your own tech startup was something that parents would approve of.
What a decade
But if you turn the clock back to 2011 when Marc Andreessen made his famous assertion… are things really that different or have they just incrementally improved? Sure we have new varieties of Uber, more stuff is sold online, and most consumer services like banking and insurance are way more convenient than they used to be, and you can listen or watch anything you want in a moment. A lot of ‘eating’ has been done by software, but now only the hard limits and high-hanging fruit are remaining, things are slowing down, tech isn’t the force for change it used to be.
The next big thing won’t be from Silicon Valley
Yes there’ll be new companies but when we see something like the iPhone again it won’t be from Silicon Valley. I don’t mean the geographical area, but the economy of VC-backed tech startups that has kept TechCrunch busy for 15 years.
The internet and the iPhone were decades in the making and we are now rounding out the project with the plethora of SaaS companies and apps that are still being built today. Are any of them revolutionary? No. Are they valuable in their own right? Yes. Is working in tech a noble pursuit? Yes.
When something else ‘revolutionary’ comes along it will be a deeptech, like biotech or climatetech, that we’re not au fait with today.
I still love ‘tech’
Every day I work with designers, developers and product managers to build new stuff that will be used by real people and it feels good. I intend to spend the rest of my career continuing the wonderful project of improving how we live and work using information technology. There’s still so much to do — think of all the work computers could be doing in the workplace and in our personal lives. Most things labelled “smart” still aren’t that smart (phones, speakers, contracts). But it’s all incremental from here on.
A quick note on a16z today
Since Andreessen Horowitz’ remarkable success has been based on the perpetual growth of internet software, it makes sense that they are misguidedly supporting the ponzi-on-terrible-tech that is web3. Marc Andreessen wants to feel young again, to feel the excitement of the revolution, to push the profitably of the web further, to financialize everything. Web3 is a response to this problem of irrelevancy. It’s tech VC looking for revolutionary outcomes where none exist.
Let’s be happy with what we built on the web and continue the noble work of improving it further.
Namaste,
web2 boomer
