I just read a new booklet from O’Reilly called The Software Paradox by Stephen O’Grady. You can access it here.
Here is a direct quote:
“This is the Software Paradox: the most powerful disruptor we have ever seen and the creator of multibillion-dollar net new markets is being commercially devalued, daily. Just as the technology industry was firmly convinced in 1981 that the money was in hardware, not software, the industry today is largely built on the assumption that the real revenue is in software. The evidence, however, suggests that software is less valuable—in the commercial sense—than many are aware, and becoming less so by the day. And that trend is, in all likelihood, not reversible. The question facing an entire industry, then, is what next?”