i've been bashing on "software is dead" for a while now. it's probably time for me to start sharing what i think will happen instead as well there's so much to unpack, so i'm going to split it into a series of a few parts today i'll start with part 1 - jevons paradox story time - let's rewind to the industrial revolution, when steam engines powered all the factories, railways and effectively the economy but steam engines had to burn coal - a lot of them. there's a limited amount of coal available, so people started to optimize the steam engines to use less coal that's when the counter-intuitive thing happened - when steam engines used less coal, the industry actually ended up using more coal in total how?? what jevons found and documented in his book was - when steam engines used less coal, they became cheaper to deploy and run, and hence became economically viable in more places, so the total demand rose significantly as a result when the barrier of entry to create software is significantly reduced, the same will happen - software will become much cheaper and more accessible hesitant to pay $100/month for the adobe suite today? well, what if it becomes $10 lifetime purchase? sick of so many mobile apps having a paywall? well, what if the entire app store is $5/month all-you-can-eat? the price point for each individual piece of software will drop, but the software economy as a whole will become a lot larger because of the rising consumption demand so many more people and businesses will get access to software that's too costly for them to use today so many more people who aren't developing software today will be able to participate, create, help grow the economy and make a living out of it software is nowhere near "dead". it's just about to take off