A recent column by Netscape co-founder, software entrepreneur, and noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen caused a stir in the tech community. Andreessen postulated that the software industry was “eating the world” and “poised to take over broad swathes of the economy.” This is delusional.
It’s a clear case of someone with a hammer – Andreessen developed software, ran software companies, and now invests in software companies – seeing everything as a nail. The irony is, software is hardly a hotbed of innovation.
While technology races ahead in many other fields, software has advanced but meagerly in the past 20 years. In terms of solving grand challenges, software has largely failed to deliver. Take the case of voice recognition. It’s much better than it was in areas like airlines’ reservation phone trees. But despite billions of research dollars no company has produced commercially available, affordable voice recognition software that can understand and transcribe, from voice to text, conversations involving multiple voices. Likewise, voice recognition software requires training to work well – it’s not speaker independent. Yes, an IBM (IBM) team did take on live Jeopardy! champions and beat them but the Herculean effort required to program a supercomputer to accomplish this just illustrates the enormous chasm that continues to exist between software and the solution of truly great challenges.
To read the full, original article click on this link: How Software is Harming Science, Engineering - BusinessWeek
Author:Vivek Wadhwa
