2011年有篇著名文章《软件吞噬世界》。2024年的今天读到一篇贝佐斯推荐的文章：《软件的终结》
互联网出现后，内容创造的成本无限趋近于零。最终由用户生成内容的平台，打败花钱买高价值内容的平台。价值创造转移到控制发行的平台上。就如抖音、公众号。
软件的创建成本很高。你必须付钱给人们来创建、维护和分发它。因为软件的创建成本很高，所以它必须赚钱。我们为此付费——软件许可证、SaaS、每席位定价等。软件利润历来是令人羡慕的架构——90% 以上的利润和零边际分销成本。
软件之所以昂贵，是因为开发人员的成本很高。他们是熟练的翻译者——他们将人类语言翻译成计算机语言，反之亦然。 LLMs 已经证明自己在这方面非常高效，并将把创建软件的成本降至零。
当软件不再需要赚钱时会发生什么？我们将经历软件的寒武纪大爆发，就像我们对内容的经历一样。
软件公司将像媒体公司一样被取代，从而产生一套控制发行的新平台。
SaaS、ARR、幻数——这些都是理解软件业务构建的旧模式的简写，在这种模式中，与创建软件相关的费用是一条护城河。
看不见的手已经在软件中停留了很长一段时间，但LLMs将迎来它迅速、熟悉的纠正力量。今天主修计算机科学就像 90 年代末主修新闻学一样。
To understand how software will change, we can benefit from studying how technology has changed other industries. History tends to rhyme, if you listen.
Before the internet, media behaved very differently—it was expensive to create. You had to pay people to make content, edit it, and distribute it. Because content was expensive to create, it had to make money. And consumers paid—newspapers, magazines, books, cable, and pay per view. Warren Buffett famously loved newspapers—and who wouldn’t love a predictable subscription business with local monopolistic dynamics?
When the internet happened, media companies viewed it as a way to reach broader audiences and reduce their distribution costs. But what no one saw coming was that the internet not only reduced distribution costs to zero, but it also drove the cost of creating content to zero. User generated content flourished, and when content doesn’t cost anything to create, it no longer has to make money. How does content behave when it no longer has to make money? The relaxation of this economic constraint led to a Cambrian explosion–you can take a picture of a cup of coffee, post it to a million views or none at all and the market clearing price is still met. This produced a deluge of content that none of us could reasonably consume. This necessitated products to direct attention, merchandise this content, and route us effectively–we understand these now as user-generated content platforms.
These platforms completely T-boned media companies. As a media company, you were competing for the same attention of users, but with a strictly higher COGS. The more people you had on your payroll that were creating content, the more exposed you were to being flanked by user-generated content platforms. Structurally, investing in media has been a losing value proposition ever since and value creation has shifted entirely to the platforms that control distribution.
Software is expensive to create. You have to pay people to create it, maintain it, and distribute it. Because software is expensive to create, it has to make money. And we pay for it–software licenses, SaaS, per seat pricing, etc. Software margins have historically been an architectural envy–90+% margins and zero marginal cost of distribution.
Software is expensive because developers are expensive. They are skilled translators–they translate human language into computer language and vice-versa. LLMs have proven themselves to be remarkably efficient at this and will drive the cost of creating software to zero. What happens when software no longer has to make money? We will experience a Cambrian explosion of software, the same way we did with content.
Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers. Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points. Software companies will be replaced the same way media companies were, giving rise to a new set of platforms that control distribution.
SaaS, ARR, magic numbers–these are all shorthand to understand the old model of business building in software, one where the expense associated with creating software was a moat. The invisible hand has been stayed in software for a long time, but LLMs will usher in its swift, familiar corrective force. Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.