Marc Andreesen observes that software has arrived. Not in a big announcement, but quietly and pervasively, software has arrived. Software has arrived on two fronts, at the use level, and at the production level. No single event marks the occasion, simply that we can now point to an earlier era of angst and navel gazing that besotted software engineers and those who putatively managed them, agonising over software quality and scale. Not that everything is better but software is now ubiquitous, it runs at astonishing scale, it is used by or for practically everything. Ergo the problems of production have diminished, empirically, as evidenced by the fact that the stuff that gets out there works and works well.
"Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale." Andreesen, 2011
The consequence? The cataclysmic disruption of extant business, products, models and markets businesses by software driven innovation.
References
Marc Andreesen, 2011. (
link)
