Prosper Williams, Econsultancy (excerpt)

In his now famous 2011 Wall Street Journal article, ‘Why software is eating the world’, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and tech icon Marc Andreessen predicted a “dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies were poised to take over large swathes of the economy”.

Andreessen observed that the technology industry typically ran in 10-year cycles, a rule which is as true today as it was 30 years ago.

In the 80s the big trend in technology was hardware and process optimisation, this is where organisations like IBM and Wang came to the fore. In the 90s it was software and productivity that took companies like Microsoft to prominence. The 00s was all about the web and information retrieval, of course dominated by Google.

Then from 2007 onwards, something fundamental happened (driven by mobile and the release of the iPhone), companies were finally able to leverage the decades of knowledge built up in the computer and modern internet revolution to transform established business structures.

Now the bedrock of business was no longer solely brick and mortar touch points, but industries which ran on software and were delivered as online services.

This is what Andreessen saw, a world in which the next decade was to be dominated by digital native companies and, as defined by digital anthropologist Brian Solis, a world in which traditional organisations realign or invest in new technology and business models to drive value for customers and compete in an ever changing digital economy, or what we now term as digital transformation.