[samiv]

It's like the business of selling electric drills. People don't really want drills they want holes. But holes are difficult to sell so the selling the drills is a proxy for that.

In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service).

You could argue that in either case the proxy is not what people want but yet because of the difficulty of selling the "actual" thing the proxy market has flourished.

We're now inventing a new tool that will completely disrupt that market and any software business that is predicated on the complexity required to create the software to transform the data is going to get severely disrupted. Software itself will be worthless.

[skydhash]

Software is not becoming worthless.

The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules.

What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode.

Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.

[samiv]

Software is just means to an end. Data and data transformation is what people want. Software has sellable dollar value only because creating the software to do the data transformation has had real associated cost. I.e anyone who wanted a particular data transformation had to pay to get the software that does it.

When you drive down that cost you drive down the potential value of the software products. Remember that what is a cost to one party is revenue to the other party. Without revenue there cannot be profit and without revenue software has no dollar value.

If anyone can create "photoshop" with minimal cost and there are thousands of said "photoshop" apps what will be the retail sell value of those apps. Close to zero.

This same lifecycle already happened with games. Driving down the cost of producing games resulted in a proliferation of games that are mostly worthless that you can't even give away.