Outgrowing Software

I think the same thing is now happening in TV and in cinema. Technology (and now lockdown) broke apart the old model and changed all the rules, but the questions about the new models are TV and cinema questions, not software questions.

More fundamentally, though, for both music and books, most of the arguments and questions are music industry questions and book industry questions, not tech or software questions. Spotify is suing Apple over the App Store commission rules, but otherwise, all the Spotify questions are music questions. Why don’t artists make more from streaming? Ask ... See more

But again, tech will change everything, but once the dust has settled the questions that matter will mostly be retail questions, not tech questions. What’s the product, how do you know about it and how do you get it? Those are retail, brand and marketing questions.

80% of the world’s adult population has a smartphone now, so how many things can we do with that? That’s what ‘software is eating the world’ means. But part of that is also that Walmart wasn’t built by car people, from Detroit. It was built by retailers. Sam Walton was born a decade after the Model T, and this year’s MBA class was born the year Net... See more