> 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomson

> 0) All companies are now software companies. See https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are-technology-companies-now/ https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/all-companies-are... Technology != software. This is a distinction that I've found the vast majority of software people implicitly assume doesn't exist. A sibling comment points out that physical logistics sometimes can't be solved (competitively) by technology alone, but I posit that this is true even within technology. That is, not all technology problems can be (best/competitively) solved by software alone. None of FAANMG depends exclusively on software, running on someone else's hardware and network. G famously customizes their servers, and they had hardware frugality as part of their core strategy from the very start. > encumbered by legacy systems e.g. mainframes That may not be as great an encumbrance as you imagine, considering the kind of performance modern mainframes can deliver. Are they over-paying for that performance, compared to best-case commodity hardware? Of course, since mainframes (for the latest models) are a monopoly. They may also be over-paying for the software and/or developers. A startup with AWS-based infrastructure will be over-paying, too. Cloud may not be a monopoly, but it's at least arguable if the competition is robust. That distributed computing system, with all the inefficiency added by the distribution, may be remarkably copetitive for someone that's paying below commodity prices for infrastructure. For someone paying 10x commodity to a cloud provider, not so much.