Marc Andressen in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle talks about the next new things in the form of “digital industries”:
Digital photography, digital music, digital video, digital gadgets and gizmos. Mobile telephony, mobile data, high-speed wireless, broadband, satellite.
Just across the board. Everywhere you look, it’s proliferating like mad.
Digital cameras for this Christmas are so cheap and so good it’s unbelievable. Consumers are adopting digital video in their homes at phenomenal rates, whether it’s digital satellite, digital video recorders or DVDs.
Digital music is enormous. And what’s happening in the record industry is going to happen in the TV and movie industries. Half a million movies are being dialed up on the Internet each day. I mean, it’s like rolling. You know, it’s happening.
Telephony is changing very quickly. The people who did Kazaa for music sharing have another thing called Skype, which is free, peer-to-peer Internet phone calls. They’ve nailed it.
Wi-Fi is proliferating like mad. Broadband is proliferating very quickly.
On the business computing side, there’s another set of changes. The server hardware landscape is commoditizing (prices are dropping) right now. It’s what happened to the PC in the 1970s and 1980s.
Storage is commoditizing. Network computer is commoditizing. Software is commoditizing.
People say nothing interesting is happening in software. Google, Amazon, EBay, Orbitz, Expedia and Match.com — all these Internet things — they’re software companies. They’re not shipping you software in a box, they’re putting the software up on a Web site.
If you peel back those companies, all they have are software developers. Software developers, a big server complex and a big marketing campaign. It’s a new kind of software company, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we should get excited about.
