Andy Grove predicts bad times ahead for America’s software and services industry:
He predicted that the software and services industry is about to travel the well-worn path of the steel and semiconductor industries. Steel’s market share dropped from about 50 percent to 10 percent in a few decades. U.S. chip companies saw theirs shrink from 90 percent to about 50 percent today. Now the writing is on the wall that software could suffer the same fate, said Grove, whose 1996 bestseller was titled Only the Paranoid Survive.
Grove’s solution is government policies tearing down protectionist barriers and more advanced degrees for American software engineers.
Thanks, but I’ll pass. An awful lot of software engineering doesn’t take highly-trained geniuses, and as the world economy becomes more decentralized, the export of jobs is inevitable. The solution, if there is one, is to export more products and to be more efficient in our production of them.
The solution is for our people to move on to making other things besides software. The government can help by deregulating our other industries so that they are as lightly regulated as the computer software industry was.
The most hilarous quote in the article, of course, was
““In trade, I don’t think anybody questions the free trade credentials of this administration,” he added.”