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“ We are long software ” Of all the suit babble I ever heard, this must be the most incomprehensible. Juggling stock options apparently wreaks havoc on the speech center of your brain.
“ We are long software ” Of all the suit babble I ever heard, this must be the most incomprehensible. Juggling stock options apparently wreaks havoc on the speech center of your brain.
The author just inadvertently left out the word " on " as in "we are long on software", or "long on gold", "long on the euro", etc. It's typical phrasing that describes a long-term bet on something going up in value.
Oil is fundamentally rent-seeking. You're pumping money out of the ground. Software platform companies are the real equivalents. I think the difference is that the state of the art shifts so quickly, long term survival for platforms is questionable. There's always a new player.
I'm not convinced by this blog post that "software" is the new oil. To me, it's the top talent of "software PROGRAMMERS" that's the "oil". Let's pretend that Google Inc opensourced their entire software stack. Now, anyone can just spend money on hardware and datacenters and "replicate" what Google does in a certain sense. But did you really duplicate their abilities? Would intelligent and visionary investors fund suc…
So does that make all the rest of us plain programmers the grease?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen. Data is collected. Oil is sold.
> The difference between data and oil is that you aren't going to drive to the oilfields one morning and find that it's all been hacked and stolen. Ask Western oil workers in Libya or Nigeria or Venezuela or Mexico (depending on the decade) how accurate they feel that sentence is. Oil concessions have been regularly expropriated.
I'll sell you some shares in my software company at the same multiple. We've even got better margins. It'll be great. I promise.