Software is Eating Industries

Judging just by a bunch of products around me right now I can clearly see their value, performance and rating is owed to software that powers them. Now, in the middle of the 2nd decade of the 3rd millennium we've crossed the pivotal point of software vs hardware. The trend started some time ago with personal computers and later was reinforced by mobile phones but today it is everywhere, opening a chasm between companies that manage to master software and the ones that don't. In automotive it is Tesla and Google vs Detroit and Japan. In personal computing it is Google vs Apple and Microsoft. In photography it seems to be Sony vs Nikon and Canon and even the recent winners like GoPro seem to be vulnerable to DJI taking the market of video enthusiasts with the Phantom drones and the Osmo.

But software is difficult. More difficult than most people think. Take TV. Apple is very careful with the steps. Google is trying hard but failed already twice. Now the third time the Android TV seems to be on a right path but still there is no TV vendor that could claim a really good adoption. Philips tried once in 2014 and now tries to forget the old line of Android - based TVs. The 2015 series models are better but despite being very promising on the overall feature set, still require a lot of patience. Philips TV software team clearly struggles to pull the platform to a decent level of integration with the hardware.

It takes a huge shift of manager's mindset to embrace the software - based reality. Especially if the managers carry the background of years of hardware legacy. But this will be the factor deciding between the winners and the losers. And the winning tactics start from realizing and accepting how hard the software is and how equally important it is to master. And then shifting the attention and the budgets.