Software used to be the product. Increasingly, software is the labour, the interface, and the institution’s nervous system all at once.
That shift makes a familiar category mistake tempting: if anyone can generate software, software companies must become less valuable. The opposite is more interesting. Implementation gets cheaper while judgement, distribution, trust, and proprietary feedback loops become far more valuable.
The next defining companies will not merely add intelligence to an old workflow. They will reorganise the workflow around what intelligence makes newly possible — and then defend the position that reorganisation creates.
A company remains the best machine we have for holding a long conviction. The shape of that machine is changing. Its ambition should not.