Marc Andreessen famously explained his theory of Why Software Is Eating The World in the Wall Street Journal in 2011.
I am paraphrasing:
A "technological and economic shift" is happening. The world is becoming a global, digitally wired economy. The masses have growing access to personal computers, broadband, and now smartphones. Online services are increasingly more popular, becoming permanently integrated with daily habits. As demand grows, more low-cost SaaS and PaaS infrastructure products (Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Digital Ocean, etc.) are being offered that enable entrepreneurs to launch online businesses by renting micro-instances of infrastructure, and pay as they go, unlike in the past, when businesses had to spend five, six figures or more for the full computer infrastructure equipment needed to keep a business up and running. Suddenly, incumbent moats, barriers of entry of ago are becoming a thing of the past. A couple of agile software developers working out of an apartment can write the software needed to create a global business that threatens a slower-moving, large-scale, established incumbent business. This happened in the case of Amazon, and many others. Even companies with previously no connection at all to software are being "eaten by software," as more services are being delivered (and expected to be delivered) online.
Marc Andreessen: "Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming... in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic."
The "Software is Eating the World" theory was revisted in 2014 by Marc Andreessen and his investing partner Ben Horowitz in the a16z podcast: "Ben and Marc Explain (Practically) Everything – Part 1," this time with a focus on the "Mobile is Eating the World," theory also illustrated by this slidedeck by a16z partner Benedict Evans, and in this WSJ article, "Never Mind Software – Mobile is Eating the World."
Marc Andreessen: "Starting in 2007, with the iPhone, the smartphone comes out. The smartphone finally packages computers in a form where everybody on the planet can have one... I think everybody on the planet by the end of the decade is going to have a smartphone. Effectively everybody. Almost everybody. Including in places where it’s still hard to get electricity or water, people are going to have smartphones... So, I think we’re going to live in a world by the end of the decade in which there’s five, six, seven billion smartphones in people’s hands, which means five, six, seven billion people in the world connected to the Internet with what we would consider modern tools and technologies and access... I think the next five years is basically prime time to think about every business, every industry, every field and say, “Well, how can we reinvent it now knowing that software can basically play such an important role in everything.”
A few slides from the Mobile is Eating the World slidedeck, by Benedict Evans of a16z:
"The unconnected are shrinking."
Between 2014 and 2020, "Another billion people will come online, all due to smartphones."
"By 2020 80% of the adults on earth will have a smartphone."
"The smartphone industry dwarfs PCs."
"More time is spent in mobile apps than on all of the web."
Not only are "Software and Mobile Eating the World," but "communities" of people are reorganizing online in the "cloud," as explained by Balaji Srinivasan of a16z in the article Software is Reorganizing the World:
"It is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed.
With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud — and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus. Hundreds of millions of people have now migrated to the cloud, spending hours per day working, playing, chatting, and laughing in real-time HD resolution with people thousands of miles away … without knowing their next-door neighbors.
Though the separation between our bodies is still best characterized by the geographical distance between points on the surface of the earth, the distance between our minds is increasingly characterized by a completely different metric: the geodesic distance, the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network.
Perhaps the single most important feature of these states of mind is the increasing divergence between our social and geographic neighbors, between the cloud formations of our heads and the physical communities surrounding our bodies. An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet — vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location."