Software has eaten the world, fading into the background like electricity or cars before, and is now secondary to conventional industry differentiation concerns
Benedict Evans : Tweets: @chanezon , @josephflaherty , @eric_seufert , @eric_seufert , @hkanji , @craigmod , @benedictevans , @helgeklein , and @dwellington Tweets: @chanezon : “this year's MBA class was born the year Netscape launched.” When my daughter wears one of my old Netscape sweatshirts, her friends think it is Nescafe the coffee brand. https://twitter.com/... Joseph Flaherty / @josephflaherty : From a centuries long vantage point, the “internet era” = 1995-2025(?) Maybe it runs until 2035? Not arguing that “tech” will disappear, merely the leverage will move away from technologists and back to MBAs, regulators, etc. Good essay: https://www.ben-evans.com/... https://twitter.com/... Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert : The idea of a “tech” industry or of “tech” journalism has always troubled me. “Tech” is a meaningless modifier; it's too broad of an umbrella term to provide context. “Hyphenated” tech like adtech or fintech or agtech implies relevant specialization (1/X) Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert : 2/ This article by @benedictevans expresses the limitation of dissecting “tech” from a different angle: the problems that companies across different categories face are fundamentally different despite similar applications of “tech” https://www.ben-evans.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : Software companies end up growing into non-software over time https://www.ben-evans.com/... Craig Mod / @craigmod : “... total US book market revenues last year were perhaps $25bn, where Amazon's US revenue was $260bn. No-one in tech cares about online book sales or ebooks.” https://www.ben-evans.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions. I wrote about music, books, TV, Tesla and retail - $20-30 trillion, all in. https://www.ben-evans.com/... Helge Klein / @helgeklein : Consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That's pretty much what tech has done to media industries - it changes everything and then it leaves. (@benedictevans) https://www.ben-evans.com/... @dwellington : Outgrowing software https://www.ben-evans.com/... https://www.ben-evans.com/... < Very important point: from the inside of the tech industry it's easy to fall into a tech-centric view of the world, but all the success stories are about something enabled by tech, not the tech itself.
Context & Ripple Effects
Benedict Evans has spent years documenting how platform leverage works — including how [[a:920632|corporations controlling music and ebooks lost their strategic value once tech platforms owned the customer relationship]]. His new essay closes that loop: software itself has become the commodity layer, fading into the background the way electricity and cars did, so advantage reverts to conventional industry differentiation.
The argument retroactively vindicates a warning from Elad Blog that VCs were increasingly investing in businesses that aren't software-driven — at the time framed as a discipline problem, now readable as an early sighting of exactly this transition. It also echoes the contrarian books arguing big tech's dominance came from regulatory evasion and labor practices more than software superiority per se [[a:934779]].
First-order effects
- For founders and operators, the essay resets the benchmark for what counts as a moat: when every competitor ships comparable software, differentiation moves back to distribution, physical assets, regulation, and industry relationships.
- For investors, 'software-driven' stops functioning as a sufficient thesis filter — the premium attaches to whoever owns the complements around the code, not the code itself.
Second-order effects
- Venture capital faces a forced re-rating of its own history: the non-software bets Elad Blog criticized look less like lapses and more like early positioning for a market where software is table stakes [[a:871108]].
- Incumbents in conventional industries regain negotiating leverage against tech vendors and platform partners, unwinding the buyer-supplier asymmetry that let platforms strip value from media rights holders and other upstream suppliers [[a:920632]].
Third-order effects
- If leverage keeps migrating away from technologists, the policy debate follows the same path electricity and cars took: tech gets treated as regulated background infrastructure, consistent with accounts attributing big tech's power to ducking regulation rather than software genius [[a:934779]].
- The startup playbook survives intact but changes costume — the historical window for out-innovating incumbents at peak product-market-fit still opens [[a:925201]], but the winning entrants will pair software fluency with command of the incumbent industry's own constraints.
The trend: Technology is completing its shift from differentiating capability to invisible infrastructure, with strategic leverage passing from those who write the software to whoever controls the complementary assets around it.