Software Is Deflationary

Lately I’ve been thinking about this idea: the value of a piece of software decreases over time.

Reading old blog posts from the early-mid 2010s can be confusing. Like, really? Why is “cloud” such a revolutionary, big deal? People were losing their absolute minds about cloud computing in 2015. Every startup’s name was like Cloudsuite, H1 of every company was Your Workloads…On The Cloud. There was an insane amount of alpha in the simple idea of having remote storage that was infinitely scaleable and provisionable.

Going back another decade and everyone was freaking out about Object Oriented Programming™️. People wrote in excruciating length the intricacies of encapsulation, separation of concerns, domain driven design…and also about wonderfully minor questions like whether a field should be exposed through a getter, whether object creation required a factory, or whether validation belonged in the controller, the service layer, or the domain model — all in service of apps that are basically CRUD apps by today’s standards.

Of course, everything that was true is still true now. All of those things matter, just the value has changed. Building software is now super cheap. It’s cheaper to have 2 interns vibecode what would’ve been a 44 million dollar saas from 15 years ago.

A crazy example of the deflationary value of software from @inimino: Deep Blue in 1997 ran on super computers, pushing the limits of what they thought computing can do at the time. Nowadays we can literally run a chess engine in javascript on a mobile device and it will wipe the floor with Deep Blue. Deflation.

Counter examples of the deflationary nature of software:

  • energy efficient off-grid minimalist software - moore’s law doesn’t apply, this type of software carries it’s own value
  • encryption/privacy-preserving software - value is pretty flat
  • bitcoin - only type of “software” I can think of which the value is actually increasing

Anyways. Real deep stuff here. Just sitting around pontificating on the past & future of software before we turn it all into the great pacific trash patch of code & can no longer do our banking through the internet.

end of storey Last modified: