I'm still stunned, even though I wrote about that in my last Garage Technology Ventures column. But . . . economist Paul Romer and strategist Gary Hamel see something deeper at work. In the Industrial Age, the inputs to wealth creation were land, labor and capital. Without software, the world's supply of hard assets and brains can't combine fast enough to produce wealth that outpaces population growth.
Software is the vital catalyst, the only known antidote to Malthusian doom.
Gutenberg's 15th-century printing press revolution put software at the center of the world. Print made possible the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Think of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as two of the hottest pieces of software ever written . . . And software's influence has exploded in the era of the PC and the Internet. From Assets to Albatrosses Information encoded in software erases the value of many old bankable assets, such as real estate, storefronts and inventory.