On Aug. 20, 2011, legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a blog post—and an accompanying essay in the Wall Street Journal—that would become the sacred texts of the Silicon Valley bull run. Titled “Why Software Is Eating the World,” he argued that the global economy was undergoing a “dramatic and broad technological and economic shift” and that software companies were poised to take over large swaths of the industry.
Fifteen years later, in February 2026, Andreessen’s prophecy has been fulfilled in a manner that even the biggest bulls failed to predict. Software did indeed eat retail (Amazon), video (Netflix), music (Spotify), and telecommunications (Skype) just as Andreessen predicted, but the market got a $1 trillion shock in February because something was eating software itself. That something, of course, was artificial intelligence.
