Software is STILL Eating the World

In 2011, Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote a Wall Street Journal article declaring "software is eating the world." A decade later, software is still eating the world. The pandemic has helped it.

Software is Eating Business Travel

Microsoft Teams and Zoom have made video-based meetings normal in business. It's now unthinkable for a new laptop to lack a webcam. Many meeting rooms now have video conferencing equipment.

Software is Eating the Office Phone

Now that many staff work from home for part of the week, work-related VoIP software has become routine on PCs and Macs. There was already a shift away from on-premise dedicated PBXs towards cloud-hosted multi-tenant PBXs offering Android, iPhone, PC and Mac apps. Now, many employees can make and receive work calls on their mobiles. As firms refresh their technology, quite a few will ditch desk phones for good. 

Software is Eating Servers

Virtualisation allowed firms to consolidate workloads onto fewer physical servers. This is accelerating as companies switch from on-premise dedicated hardware to cloud-hosted alternatives with greater economies of scale.

Software is Eating the High Street

The lockdowns drove a shift towards e-commerce and m-commerce. Now that the lockdowns have been lifted, there's been a partial shift back to the high street. But things aren't going back to how they were. Many tech laggards have finally been persuaded to buy online. This has driven a shift in commercial property away from retail of non-perishable goods towards more service-orientated uses such as coffee shops, bistros and gyms. Away from the high street, the shift towards e-commerce has increased demand for warehousing and logistics space, cementing the change by enabling faster delivery of e-commerce orders.

Software is Eating Cash

Contactless payments - often enabled by the Apple Pay and Google Wallet apps - are reducing the need for coins and notes.

Software is Eating Banks

Thanks to FinTech startups, you're now able to open a bank account, transfer money, apply for a loan, and exchange foreign currency via apps. Know Your Customer requirements can often be met by taking video selfies with government-issued IDs, checked by firms such as Onfido. You can now pay small cheques into your bank by taking photos of them. Banks are nudging customers away from paper statements towards downloadable ones accessed via apps.

Software is Eating Newspapers

Newspaper publishers are driving their subscribers to subscribe to their app-based versions - and subscriber figures show this attempt is working. Publishers such as Future Plc are turning many offline magazines into online properties that make money via affiliate programmes. Papers such as The Independent and magazines such as Time Out have gone online only. 

Software is Eating Books and Audiobooks

Around one in seven books sold is an e-book. Over 95% of audiobooks sold are downloaded. Pearson, a major publisher of textbooks, has been publishing an all-you-can-eat electronic textbook subscription costing $9.99 per month.

Software is Eating TV and Radio

For young adults, streaming is the norm, except when it comes to televised sport and appointment-to-view television. Spotting the writing on the wall, the BBC now copies its linear radio content to an on-demand streaming app - BBC Sounds. Even live sport is being streamed as Amazon and DAZN gain sporting rights. Spotify's move into podcasts and contextual playlists is eating into radio consumption.

Software is Eating YOUR Industry

Workflows are being digitised. Customer acquisition is shifting online. Customers are increasingly being offered online portals through which they can view their accounts, adjust their services and view their bills.

Organisations that persist in using employees to do routine work that could be done by software will find themselves at a cost and speed disadvantage to more digitally-minded rivals. The same goes for non-luxury organisations that pay employees to enter details that could be entered by customers themselves.   

By embracing the shift towards greater use of software, your organisation can help keep itself competitive - by using software to reduce process costs, speed up processes and reduce human error.

Software Doesn't Have To Be Hard

Even if you don't have the budget to pay programmers, you can still digitise workflows, for example, by intelligently combining highly functional SaaS apps with low-code/no-code tools such as Microsoft Power Platform and Zapier.

You can use Microsoft Teams calls and VPNs to enable staff to work from home and reduce unnecessary business travel.

You can shift your server-based workloads to cloud hosting, improving digital service uptime and scalability. 

As an ever-increasing portion of your work and customer interactions happen through software, you may be able to make the business case for hiring programmers.

In the old days, organisations like yours might not have hired programmers. Now that software is eating the world, different rules apply.

To some extent, almost all businesses are becoming tech businesses. 

Software isn't Necessarily Customer-Facing

We have three in-house programmers. We usually don't mention them here as only a fraction of their output is customer-facing. 

They mainly focus on creating internal tools that help our staff do their jobs more easily - principally by automating workflows and making it easier for staff to find exactly the information they need quickly.

Your competitors may be similarly reticent about highlighting their use of programmers. Unless you keep an eye on their job adverts and LinkedIn profiles, you may not even notice that your rivals are using software to outcompete you - cutting their costs, speeding up their processes and empowering their customers to do more themselves via self-service portals.

Software isn't Done Eating The World

It is twenty years since the dot-com crash and fourteen since the launch of the iPhone app store. Software still has a lot of the world left to eat.

This shift towards digitisation will only increase now that most employees and customers have smartphones and broadband. Venture capital firms are on the lookout for attractive SaaS firms to fund - given the relatively certainly provided by recurring subscription revenue. Many firms now have their own APIs, enabling their larger customers and suppliers to interact with them digitally.

Many of the trends mentioned in this article are still going strong. You only need to look at the demographics of e-commerce users to know that the existing shift towards electronic purchasing has further to go. After years of double-digit growth, public cloud hosting is STILL growing by over 20% pa. The shift towards VoIP is set to accelerate - with the UK's traditional phone network (the PSTN) being decommissioned in late 2025. Software is eating the world, and something you don't get a choice.

There's still plenty of scope left for software to make organisations more efficient. Anywhere there's an Excel spreadsheet regularly updated by an employee, there is an opportunity to create custom workflows to do a better, quicker, less error-prone job. Much data is still being cut-and-pasted from one application or web page to another -  another classic sign of missing software development.

There's still a great deal of the world left for software to eat. And that's a huge opportunity for your organisation.

Here at hSo we provide cloud, connectivity and network security services to UK-based organisations looking to make the most of their digital opportunities.