The software of making

We think differently when we have different technologies available to us.

If you think about software you think about different companies depending on how old you are. From Bell Labs to IBM, from Sun to Microsoft, from SAP to Google, from Amazon to Tik Tok. What the software companies do has also changed, and so has their influence. Influence not just in terms of how politically powerful these companies have become, but how much its processes have replaced traditional things. Every technology will have its bad and good but I want to focus on the good things more.

At the start, all we had were the books. We wrote and rewrote till we built a process of doing things and we kept improving the process. Analysing more data, writing better records and finally structured reasoning with physics and mathematics. We built calculators, pressed buttons and out came numbers. We grouped numbers on a screen and built spreadsheets. Today anything anyone can write, can be run. The fact that every human now expects personalisation in apps is a testimony to the permissive and customizable nature of computing.

Software was once buttons on a machine. AI revolution has exponentially increased the scope of what software was meant to do. Now software has come into thinking with agents that can take autonomous actions in the digital space. It can do things on your behalf all while sitting in a datacenter. Our work is getting more automated and few can proudly, or with fear, say that their work can be done by Claude. Small companies with fully personalised and customised software. These are software principles coming into the thinking world.

Software today means thinking. But to believe software principles are limited is to misunderstand or worse underestimate it. Software principles will come into physical world (some might mistakenly call it real world). Outcome will be similar on paper to how software-first companies will operate and benefits (or harms) to consumers are. Everything will be personalised, highly available, made to order for anything.

Software tomorrow means making. I call this part “the software of making”. There will be new datacenters, new applications, new services, new tools and new business models for this era of software. The bits of this era are the plastic filaments, metal powders and carbon fibre. The churning process of abstraction and reduction will continue where machines will do 10x more with 10x less parts. The computers of this era are the 3D printers.

Demand for computing is infinite, datacenter and edge combined will become a new thinking membrane. And so will large on demand 3D printing, become the making membrane.

When we think differently we have different technologies available to us.