Outgrowing Software

Everyone’s software is good enough. Software used to be the weapon, now it’s just a tool.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste. The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted — from tech to distribution, and now, to something else too: taste. [2]

Taste is

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What Marc Andreessen understood at this tipping point was that technological innovations — like in transportation, with Uber, and hospitality, with Airbnb — often emerge when it seems we need them least.

So it’s fitting that exactly a decade later, we’ve come to another watershed moment. Software has eaten the world, and now it’s a commodity. It’s n... See more

So it’s fitting that exactly a decade later, we’ve come to another watershed moment. Software has eaten the world, and now it’s a commodity. It’s not about the technology anymore. The era of the engineer has ended; the era of the curator has begun.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them. There’s an old saying that the first ... See more

Everyone’s software is good enough.

Software used to be the weapon, now it’s just a tool.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste. The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted — from tech to distribution, and now, to something else: taste.

Other industries, though, are matter industries .

Think energy or agriculture. These things are necessarily physical. Electricity requires electrons. Digital food doesn’t fill bellies.

For the past few decades, as software has eaten the world, entrepreneurs and incumbents alike have attempted to fix these industries with software. They’ve made them m... See more