More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the increasing reliance on software and online services across various industries.
Marc Andreessen's quote emphasizes the transformative impact of software on industries and businesses in our modern economy. It underscores how essential digital infrastructure has become, driving innovation and efficiency across sectors such as entertainment, agriculture, and even national security, illustrating the pervasive role of technology in shaping contemporary society.
In practice
This quote would be great to use during a technology conference to emphasize the importance of software in today's economy.
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.
It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, 'I don't get it, I don't understand it. I think it's too weird, I think it's too unusual.'
Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.
I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.
China is very entrepreneurial but has no rule of law. Europe has rule of law but isn't entrepreneurial. Combine rule of law, entrepreneurialism and a generally pro-business policy, and you have Apple.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
The future is green energy, sustainability, renewable energy.
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.