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Why software is eating the world

lacisoft — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:55:57 +0000

An excellent article published in the Wall Street Journal, written by Marc Andressen who is co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. He also co-founded Netscape, one of the first browser companies and now is in the board of HP.

The article points out a few key facts from what today the software industry became and what its role is in modern society. Education is also mentioned and i fully agree that this one is the key for every individual who is alive and will be born in this society. Without education you have no chance in today’s world.

At the end of the article Andressen says that “I know where I’m putting my money.” Well i also knew for a time now that software, software products and support for software is the place where future is.

An excerpt from the article:

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

and another one

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

Two must reads

lacisoft — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:32:55 +0000

In the last week there were fewer interesting reads in my reader so my weekly article batch will turn this week into a must read recommendation. I will only point out two articles but oh boy they are good.

The first one is from John Batelle and is called: On Facebook, Google, and Our Evolving Social Mores Online. The article itself is interesting enough but more interesting is the presentation. It has 216 slides but it worth every minute you spend on it. You will find a different perspective on social networks and social web in general.

The other article is The Emerging Online Giants and is published in The Economist. This article goes behind the front players in the battle of the web and study a few companies that are not so well known as Google or Yahoo or Microsoft but they are steadily and quietly acquire more and more web properties and power. Its interesting to see how they will evolve and what will become of them.

P.S.

BTW, i see that The Economist is running on Drupal. Way to go!

No related posts.

Weekly article batch 2

lacisoft — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:09:08 +0000

Here is the second edition of my weekly “press review”

Interesting articles last week:

Gartner report on PHP – published by Danne Lundqvist on dotvoid.com – writes about a report by Gartner (here) that makes it clear that more and more companies discover the benefits of PHP and adoption is increasing among major companies.
A case for table-based design – published by Evert Pot on rooftopsolutions.nl – i could not agree more, table based designs are useful in some situations.
ASP.NET for PHP developers – published by Chris Taylor on net.tutsplus.com – does a great introduction to ASP.NET using C# for PHP developers. I’m even tempted to do a site in ASP.NET just for educational purpose
Why is reusable code so hard to secure ? – published on devcentral.f5.com – some aspects of this article are subject to debate but others do present us with a valid issue when developing reusable code
How to speed up your WordPress sites – published on devwebpro.com – as page speed is becoming a ranking factor for Google its nice to know what could i do with my blog if overnight would become hugely popular.
40+ essential Drupal Modules – published on nicklewis.org- well most of these should be familiar to every Drupal developer but its nice to have a place where to look up if you search for something specific and proven for the task at hand.

Weekly article batch. Edition 1

lacisoft — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:26:56 +0000

I read many articles and most times i don’t bookmark them even if they are fairly good articles and can be useful in some situations. I thought i should save them somewhere, but they are not so important to be added to bookmarks.

So starting with this year i will publish a post with these articles every week on thursday. This way i can find them when i need them and also maybe some of you can find something interesting to read among them.

The order is arbitrary and some of the articles may be older then one week. The fact is that i read them this week so they get mentioned here this week.

Interesting articles this week:

15 useful jQuery plugins and tutorials – published by designer-daily.com, contains a good selection of jQuery plugins and tutorials
Exception handling in PHP – published by devshed.com, we all come across this: exception handling, a nice overview on the topic
MySQL : Using IF in a WHERE clause – published by electrictoolbox.com, although not a good solution – an IF is possible in a WHERE clause and i post this here only for reference – i not recommend using such solutions
Dive into HTML 5 – published by diveintohtml5.org, HTML 5 is here and this is a fairly good intro in it
13 Useful Code Snippets for WordPress development, published by webdesignledger.com, WordPress in more and more a part of our life and this article can be handy if we want to customize some of the things in WordPress
Speed matters , published by Dries Buytaert on buytaert.net , increasing latency will drive your visitors away as one Google research paper points it out. So think twice before adding a feature that hurts performance

3 useful TYPO3 links

lacisoft — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:46:02 +0000

I’ve come across two great articles and some novelties about the upcoming 4.3 version of TYPO3, here they come:

45 minutes TypoScript – one of the most comprehensive tutorial about TypoScript i’ve ever seen since i work with TYPO3. It has a few nice and useful code examples too.
Using existing hooks in your own extension – as its name says this great tutorial will show you how to hook into existing functionality and alter it
Beta 3 of TYPO3 4.3 is out, go check it out – it has some neat new features like built in frontend editing