Reviving Debate: Software Nibbles, Doesn't Eat the World

In 2011, Marc Andreessen declared that "software is eating the world" [1]. Fifteen years later, something is eating software itself — and the ensuing carnage has forced a reckoning with one of Silicon Valley's most foundational myths. As AI agents hollow out the SaaS business model and software stocks shed trillions in market value, a deeper question has surfaced: did software ever really eat the world, or did it merely nibble at the edges?

The Original Promise

Andreessen's thesis, published as a Wall Street Journal op-ed in August 2011, was characteristically sweeping. He argued that powerful software platforms were consuming established industries: Amazon was devouring retail, Netflix was eviscerating Blockbuster, Spotify was disrupting the music labels. The implication was clear — every industry would eventually be swallowed by software-native companies, and those that resisted would be destroyed [1].

For a time, the evidence seemed overwhelming. Companies worldwide now spend nearly $600 billion on enterprise software annually, compared to $269 billion in 2011 — a 123% increase [2]. Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending will reach $6.15 trillion in 2026, with enterprise software representing the single largest category at over $1.4 trillion, growing at 14.7% year-over-year [3]. By sheer spending figures, software appeared to be winning.

But spending and eating are different things. The industries where software made its deepest inroads — media, retail, advertising, communications — were already information-centric. They dealt in bits, not atoms. The real test of Andreessen's thesis was always whether software could conquer the physical world: healthcare, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, government. And on that front, the evidence tells a starkly different story.

The Physical World Bites Back

Healthcare remains one of the least digitalized sectors globally, with an average digitalization score of 1.875 against a cross-industry average of 3.025 [4]. Despite billions invested in electronic health records, telemedicine, and digital health startups, the fundamental delivery of care — the surgeon's hand, the nurse's shift, the hospital bed — remains stubbornly analog.

Construction is, by its own workers' assessment, "the least technologically competent" industry [5]. Pen-on-paper schedules, field notes, and manual change orders persist as the prevailing norm despite decades of Silicon Valley promises. The barriers are structural: high hardware costs, low accessibility in rugged environments, and a conservative culture that values proven methods over digital experimentation.

Agriculture, despite a booming AgTech sector valued at $26 billion and projected to reach $74 billion by 2034, faces what the FAO calls "incomplete agricultural digitalization" [6]. In low-income regions where smallholder farmers dominate production, high upfront costs, limited access to credit, and insufficient digital literacy have restricted technology's reach. Benefits of digital transformation are, as the FAO notes, "not equally accessible."

As journalist Henry Grabar argued in a prescient 2023 Slate essay, Andreessen's thesis reflected "a persistent blind spot in Silicon Valley thinking: a tendency to overestimate the power of information technology and underestimate the complexity of the physical world" [7]. The sharing economy companies — Bird, DoorDash, Instacart, Lyft, Uber, WeWork — that attempted to use software to conquer physical-world services had largely struggled or failed outright.

The Solow Paradox Returns

The limits of software's world-eating ambitions are not merely anecdotal. They are inscribed in the macroeconomic data through what economists call the Solow productivity paradox.

In 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow observed that "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" [8]. Despite massive IT investment, productivity growth had slowed from 2.9% annually (1948-1973) to just 1.1% after 1973. The paradox appeared to resolve in the late 1990s dot-com boom, but it has returned with a vengeance in the AI era.

A February 2026 study by Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok found that thousands of CEOs reported AI had "no impact on employment or productivity," prompting Slok to invoke Solow's observation from nearly 40 years ago: "AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data" [8]. The U.S. did see a productivity jump of 2.7% in 2025, but whether this reflects genuine AI-driven gains or cyclical factors remains hotly debated.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

The SaaSpocalypse: Software Eating Itself

If the physical world resisted software's appetite, the digital world has now turned cannibalistic. In early February 2026, Anthropic unveiled its Claude Cowork legal automation tool, triggering what Jefferies traders immediately christened the "SaaSpocalypse" — erasing approximately $285 billion in software market capitalization in a single trading day [9].

The sell-off was not a flash crash. It reflected a structural rethinking of the entire SaaS business model. Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss identified a "trinity of software fears" that had reduced stock multiples by 33% since October 2025 [10]. The core logic is devastatingly simple: if 10 AI agents can do the work of 100 sales reps, you don't need 100 Salesforce seats anymore — you need 10. That's a 90% reduction in seat revenue for the same work output [11].

The damage has been extensive. ETFs tracking public software companies have fallen approximately 30% since the start of 2026, erasing all gains since the launch of ChatGPT [12]. Atlassian dropped 35%, Salesforce 28%, Adobe 22%, Intuit 37%, and ServiceNow 26% [9][11]. The software sector has lost over $1 trillion in aggregate market capitalization [10].

Morgan Stanley's head of global technology investment banking, David Chen, described the environment bluntly: "It's wartime, not peacetime" for software companies [13].

Source: FRED / S&P Dow Jones Indices

Data as of Mar 10, 2026CSV

The Counter-Arguments: Software's Durable Moats

Not everyone is buying the doomsday narrative. Andreessen Horowitz itself fired back in a March 2026 essay titled "Good News: AI Will Eat Application Software," arguing that the panic fundamentally misunderstands where software's value resides [12].

The a16z argument is that code itself was never the moat. The real competitive advantages — network effects, proprietary data, embedded workflow knowledge, brand trust — only become more valuable as AI capabilities improve. Salesforce's ecosystem, Figma's collaboration network, and decades of accumulated organizational logic cannot be replicated by an AI agent coding from scratch. As code becomes cheaper to produce, the authors argue, demand expands rather than contracts, opening workflows previously "too complex or too expensive" to serve [12].

Fast Company published a series of articles challenging the SaaSpocalypse thesis from a different angle [14]. Enterprise software, they argued, "isn't just a set of tools — it encodes the enterprise itself," holding decades of business rules, compliance requirements, governance structures, and role-based permissions. General-purpose AI agents deployed without this deep contextual knowledge would produce "generic, unreliable outputs that require constant human correction."

Bain & Company's analysis offered a more nuanced view. While acknowledging that AI has dampened near-term growth for many independent software vendors, Bain noted that average gross retention rates remain around 90% or better [15]. Installed customer bases have largely held up — it is investor confidence, not actual revenue, that has crumbled. The question, Bain concluded, is not whether software dies but whether specific vendors can successfully pivot from selling seats to selling outcomes.

The Deeper Pattern: Nibbling, Not Eating

Zoom out from the current panic, and a deeper pattern emerges. Software never ate the world. It ate the parts of the world that were already made of information. It nibbled at the edges of physical industries, often improving efficiency without fundamentally restructuring them. And now, in a supreme irony, the latest generation of software — AI — is eating the software industry itself.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data tells this story quantitatively. U.S. software publishing employment peaked at 456,100 jobs in November 2022 and has since declined to 344,100 in February 2026 — a 24.6% drop, representing 112,000 lost jobs [16]. This is not the pattern of an industry devouring others; it is the pattern of an industry being devoured.

Meanwhile, the industries that software was supposed to eat — healthcare, education, housing, transportation, agriculture, construction — remain largely intact in their fundamental structures. A hospital in 2026 looks remarkably similar to a hospital in 2011. A construction site has barely changed. The median American home costs more, not less, despite decades of PropTech promises. Education remains centered on teachers in classrooms, even after COVID-era experiments with remote learning.

The Gartner forecast of $1.4 trillion in enterprise software spending in 2026 [3] does not contradict this reading. Much of that spending reflects IT departments buying tools for existing workers — incremental efficiency gains, not revolutionary restructuring. As Gartner noted, a significant portion of the recent spending surge is driven by AI infrastructure ($230 billion in 2026, up from $60 billion the previous year) and vendor price increases, not organic expansion of software's domain.

What Comes Next

The current moment offers three possible futures for the software industry.

The Bear Case: AI agents progressively replace not just individual SaaS tools but entire categories of knowledge work. The per-seat licensing model collapses. Software companies that cannot reinvent themselves as AI-native platforms face a slow death spiral of declining seat counts and eroding margins. Morgan Stanley's warning of a "jobless expansion" — GDP growth without proportional employment gains — becomes reality [10].

The Bull Case: The a16z thesis proves correct. AI makes software dramatically cheaper to build and deploy, expanding the total addressable market into workflows and industries previously too expensive to digitize. Software finally begins to eat the physical world in earnest, powered by agents that can navigate complex real-world processes. The current stock decline is a buying opportunity [12].

The Nibble Case: Neither extreme materializes. AI reshapes software pricing models and eliminates some categories of tools, but enterprise software's deep institutional embeddedness protects it from wholesale replacement. Software continues to nibble at physical industries without fully consuming them. The productivity paradox persists. The world remains stubbornly, physically, analog in most of the ways that matter.

History suggests the third scenario is most likely. The Solow paradox has now appeared three times — with mainframes, with PCs, and with AI — each time prompting breathless predictions of total economic transformation that ultimately proved exaggerated. Software is powerful. But the world, it turns out, is harder to eat than Silicon Valley imagined.