71–80 of 89 posts
Difference between oil and software is that you can easily quantify oil (1 barrel) whereas it is tremendously hard to quantify the value of software product.
most companies pay by the click.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think all programmers are the "oil". Some are higher quality that others, just as is the case with oil. Maybe tech companies are like refineries? This analogy is getting strange, but I like it.
Yes and right now the industry is trying to create more and more programmers by pushing schools, promising riches, etc. just like the oil industry has been experimenting with various ways of extracting as much oil as possible. Wondering what the side effects equivalent to environmental pollution are in this case...
Just like pollution from the fossil-fuel industry, you can pick high-intensity problems that are restricted to the areas nearest the source, or low-intensity problems spread over the whole country/world. For example, the housing pressure in SF/SV is very high intensity but affects only a small part of the world; non-STEM high school and university departments losing prestige and/or funding is less intense in any one place but more widely distributed.
If software is the new oil, be prepared for a wild ride. The oil industry is notorious for decade-scale cycles of over-hiring and then layoffs and under-hiring, rinse-lather-repeat. Regardless, it's a good analogy, but be careful how far you take it. There's a _very_ important difference between the energy and other major industries. It's a difference that the software industry shares, but in the opposite extreme: Th…
Oil is high cap-ex, low op-ex, as labor costs are relatively cheap. Software is low cap-ex, but once you've created a prototype and need to hire people to build a business on top of it, op-ex becomes expensive.
Oil production and infrastructure maintenance aren't cheap. It's not like we just turn on the taps after the wells are drilled. However, labor is cheap, even in the software industry.
“ 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
most companies pay by the click.
No, that's ad companies you're thinking of. Software companies make money by selling services or shipping a product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excluding maybe self driving cars (maybe), I doubt that the core capability needed to drive the innovation in the above is software. I mean, that's like saying metal is everywhere in those industries. Of course it is, but it's also a commodity because it's easy enough to be produced by many competitors. I don't see software as so complex that few companies can keep the monopoly.
I didn't downvote you, but I disagree strongly. Software is both the most complex and skilled-labour-intensive thing that humanity has produced, and something that needs to be individually commissioned for any kind of real business edge. And it's supply constrained; that's why we're paid better than most of the non-finance economy. You can't just go down and pump another few thousand barrels of raw software into your…
Explain to me again how this is an analog for software?
I feel 'data' or rather big data is the new oil. There are big monopolies which control a lot of it and are trying to make sense out of it, the likes of Amazon, Google, Palantir et. al. and similarly there are companies like ExxonMobil in the energy sphere. We could in fact extend this analogy to smaller players in the renewable energy zone which are trying to make better qualitative use of their resources and simila…
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.
If software is the new oil, be prepared for a wild ride. The oil industry is notorious for decade-scale cycles of over-hiring and then layoffs and under-hiring, rinse-lather-repeat. Regardless, it's a good analogy, but be careful how far you take it. There's a _very_ important difference between the energy and other major industries. It's a difference that the software industry shares, but in the opposite extreme: Th…