Software is eating the world
So says Marc Andreessen, and I think he is right.
Full article is here at the WSJ
I case you’re lazy and want the 1-line summary:
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy
Andreessen shows how almost every industry has either been transformed already by a disruptive shift towards an online and software-centric approach, or is about to be transformed.
The bit that I find particularly cruel in the South African context, is that the shifts we are seeing take place are likely to leave economies such as our own far behind in the battle for global competitiveness.
many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.
This quote should be terrifying to South African politicians… if this is what is happening in the US, we’re in deep trouble in South Africa with our poor general standards of education.
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