While highly regarded even at the time of its writing, Marc Andreessen’s 2011 landmark essay, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” has proven even more prophetic than it seemed at the time. At the dawn of a decade when software would prove invaluable to nearly every aspect of modern life, Andreessen argued that every company was now ostensibly a software company, whether the company liked it or not.

Tailoring his argument to many of the companies that were market leaders at the time, his ideas eventually also applied to companies that either hadn’t fully defined their markets or didn’t even yet exist but would go on to generate billions in market share: Uber, Lyft, TikTok/ByteDance, Robinhood and Coinbase, among several others. If you were going to be a unicorn in the 21st century, software was probably going to be a key part of earning that horn.

The hidden motor behind this complete disruption of modern economies and life was the emergence of true cloud computing and cloud giants, an industry in which Andreessen himself had been a pioneer at a time when many inside and outside computing were scoffing at the notion.

By the second decade of the 21st century, they weren’t scoffing much at all. In the 2010s, worldwide spending on cloud computing more than quintupled, from $77 billion to $411 billion. It was the backbone of what made everything accessible at the touch of a button on the computer in our pocket.

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But there was a great cost to making so much of life so easy.

While the mobile-powered software revolution made life as easy as the push of a button, as with anything else, it came with its own compromises. With software eating the world, it