Building in the age of AI
Why would any company pay when they could get software for free? And yet we saw the opposite: open source software enabled an explosion in software products that yes, people paid for.
Ben Thompson • Databricks Buys Tabular, the End of Software?
Software is expensive to create. You have to pay people to create it, maintain it, and distribute it. Because software is expensive to create, it has to make money. And we pay for it–software licenses, SaaS, per seat pricing, etc. Software margins have historically been an architectural envy–90+% margins and zero marginal cost of distribution.
Software is expensive because developers are expensive. They are skilled translators–they translate human language into computer language and vice-versa. LLMs have proven themselves to be remarkably efficient at this and will drive the cost of creating software to zero. What happens when software no longer has to make money? We will experience a Cambrian explosion of software, the same way we did with content.
More broadly, what will remain are jobs to be done. Software needs to be stable and predictable and have infrastructure to run on; that is a lot easier to buy from an entity than to manage yourself. Businesses don’t want to be IT departments; they want to actually achieve business results, and any time spent trying to get stuff to work is a waste o... See more
Ben Thompson • Databricks Buys Tabular, the End of Software?
1/ Why AI is not going to replace programmers:
When I was in college studying Computer Science in 2005, I was told that out-sourcing to India will remove the demand for programmers. It was a real fear!
AI replacing coders, I think, it’s based on a similar misconception
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