WTF?! In San Francisco, Uber has 3x the revenue of the entire prior taxi and limousine industry.
WTF?! Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world. Airbnb has 800 employees, while Hilton has 152,000.
WTF?! Top Kickstarters raise tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of individual backers, amounts of capital that once required top-tier investment firms.
WTF?! What happens to all those Uber drivers when the cars start driving themselves? AIs are flying planes, driving cars, advising doctors on the best treatments, writing sports and financial news, and telling us all, in real time, the fastest way to get to work. They are also telling human workers when to show up and when to go home, based on real-time measurement of demand. The algorithm is the new shift boss.
Tim O’Reilly –The WTF Economy
This phrase comes from a 2011 Marc Andreessen article in the New York Times, which you can read here. In it he describes how software was – and is, and will continue to – take over the economy. Here are a few more WTF illustrations:
- The world’s largest bookstore is a software company
- Two of the world’s three biggest retailers are software companies
- Five of the U.S.’s eight biggest companies are software companies (Alphabet/Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook)… some of them even make and sell software.
- The world’s biggest Encyclopedia is mainly software… and not even a company
Conclusion / Questions:
- How are you using software in your non-software organisation?
- What would it enable if you thought of your organisation as a software company?
See Also: WTF? Technology and you