Reading

While I just started a new book, I found myself spending a lot of time this week on two articles and all the related comments, posts, counter-arguments, etc.:

–Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and beyond) – From CNET. Yes, I still check out news.com, although not as much as I once did. The article is a follow up to Andreesen’s WSJ article from August about Why Software Is Eating The World. I had a bit of a problem with a statement I thought he was making that because of smartphones “we saw the rise of a whole category of e-commerce category killers in verticals that 5 or 10 years ago couldn’t support high growth companies because the markets weren’t big enough,” but I’m probably just reading the article wrong. In any case, Software is Eating the World. He makes the great, albeit obvious case for why we’ll see more verticals eaten by software in the coming years. 6 billion smartphones in the next 3-5yrs. Wow.

-CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony put forth the thesis that the Web is Dead during his talk at Le Web (see above video). Fred Wilson picked up on it. And Mark Suster said ‘don’t bet on it.” Great to have George Colony put out something different and hear Suster walk through software development over the past 30 years in his criticism.