Last month Marc Andreessen published a significant essay in the Wall Street Journal, outlining the many ways in which software has become not just important to our world, but the critical guts and infrastructure of it. Andreessen is, of course, pointing out a trend that has been building for some time, which has culminated in a sea change in the world of business that is only beginning to be understood. The perfect example of this change is the news that the iconic HP has chosen to abandon the PC market for software, seeing the former as commoditized and the latter as the future.
Software allows us to extend our reach even further than we did before, automating processes, accelerating the rate of change, and providing the sinews between people and data. It seems only natural then, that software has come to the forefront of business technology. In this new age, the underlying workflows of businesses as varied as engineering, marketing, accounting, logistics, and entertainment can all be realized as software. In his piece, Andreessen outlines the companies that he sees as dominating their market segments in some of these industries, including LinkedIn, Amazon.com, Netflix, Google, etc. In so doing he highlights the most popular and prominent of the pack.
But, to me what's most interesting are the segments that draw less hype but are no less critical: security, data center management, business analytics and intelligence. The list of business to businesses software categories and applications goes on and on. In so many sectors, great software is not only becoming necessary to compete, but may be needed to even survive. Not so far in the future, your business may very well be defined by the choices it makes regarding software. More so than at any time in the past, software truly is strategic. Businesses house terabytes, even petabytes of data, information on customers, on products, on infrastructure, on finances, you name it; that needs to be accessed, reviewed, and analyzed.
Now imagine that every business in the future will rely on software, whether off-the-shelf or proprietary, in the cloud or on the desktop, on a mobile device or embedded in a physical system. With this in mind, you can see why there is such a need for engineering and UX talent now. It's clear that we have too few people who can do these types of jobs. Software designers and engineers with experience creating complicated workflows, dealing with big data, are few. The new age of software is upon us, as Andreessen puts it, “In short, software is eating the world.” Now it's up to us to go build it.