Marc Andreessen’s view of the world boils down to software.
From where he stands, as the guy who co-founded Netscape Communications and now co-runs the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, no industry is safe from software. Or, as Andreessen put it in a much-discussed piece that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, “Software is eating the world”.
Software has chewed up music and publishing. It’s eaten away at Madison Avenue. It’s swallowed up retail outlets like Tower Records. The list goes on.
No area is safe — and that’s why Andreessen sees so much opportunity.
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Fuelling his optimism: ubiquitous broadband, cloud computing and, above all, the smartphone revolution. In the 1990s, the internet led to crazy predictions that simply weren’t yet possible. Now they are.
We caught up with Andreessen to talk about 2012, and software’s onward march.
Let’s start with smartphones.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones, and start saying yes to smartphones. Feature phones are going to vanish out of the developed world, and over the course of five years they’ll vanish out of the developing world.
Why is that a big deal?
That’s a big deal because that’s the key enabling technology for software eats the world broadly. Because that’s what puts the computer — literally puts a computer — in everybody’s hand.
In a way that the PC industry couldn’t?
Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone …If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category, and serve you as a customer no matter where you are in the world in just gigantic numbers — in terms of billions of people
via Marc Andreessen: predictions for 2012 – Smartphones & PDA Phones.