Software Used to Eat the World. The World is Biting Back
If anything is being eaten, it’s software companies as Series A round by Series B round, their stocks and voting rights are sold to investors.
“In short, software is eating the world,” Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011. And for many years it really has seemed like it’s been lunchtime in software-ville.
Everything has turned into software. Shops are software. We book our trains, planes and automobiles through software. Work is inputted into software. It’s difficult to think of a modern activity that doesn’t involve software. There actually is a computer on every desk and in every home.
But when I look at the technology giants looming over us, it doesn’t seem like software is in control anymore. It looks like software is in the thrall of capital. Money, investors, shareholders, venture capital. When articles mention Apple, they mention its market cap. Sometimes there is a little sawblade sparkline next to its name showing its share price zigzagging upwards. If anyone is eating anything, it is the investors, not the developers. “HubSpot is not a software company,” Dan Lyons wrote in Disrupted, his book about Silicon Valley, “so much as it is a financial instrument.”
