Software Eating the World

Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world”. By that, he meant:

“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.”

Apart from the impact on journalism and what Google did to the map industry, he cites streaming video (like Netflix) wiping out the video rental industry; online music stores wiping out traditional music stores; digital photography; and companies like Skype hitting telecom companies.

And then there’s Amazon. It was selling “virtually everything online” thus impacting retail stores; and with the Kindle:

“Now even the books themselves are software.”

Over time, Amazon has continued to transform other parts of the book world (Whether for better or for worse, time will tell). First, it launched the Kindle Single, or “Compelling Ideas Expressed At Their Natural Length” as Amazon likes to describe it. What does that even mean, you ask. Julian Gough explains:

“Writers can seldom express ideas "at their natural length", because in the world of traditional print only a few lengths are commercially viable. Write too long, and you'll be told to cut it (as Stephen King was when The Stand came in too long to be bound in paperback). Worse, write too short, and you won't get published at all. Your perfect story is 50 pages long – or 70, or 100? Good luck getting that printed anywhere.”

Why’s that?

“The high fixed overheads of book production – printing, binding, warehousing and distributing a labour-intensive physical object – have tended to make books of fewer than 100 pages too expensive for the customer.”

Software makes all that a non-issue.

Recently, for authors who self-publish through Amazon’s KDP Select Program, the company has launched a “new publishing experiment”, as Maddie Stone describes it:

“In the new scheme, authors will be paid for each page that remains on the screen long enough to be parsed, the first time a customer reads the book.”

Again, that’s an idea that wasn’t possible before software.

Amazon’s system of averaging reviews by random people was far better (less biased) than the ones published in magazines and newspapers. And its “People who read this also liked” recommendations aligned with your preferences. Again, all of that wasn’t possible before software took over the world.