安德森预测：软件“编写”新时代到来

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安德森预测：软件“编写”新时代到来 | 双语

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2016-10-16 07:47

文章摘要：作者：T客汇杨丽关键词：安德森预测，趋势，物联网，移动革命，数据驱动网站：www.tikehui.com 核心提示：世界万物以互联网为载体连接起来，世界通过软件重新“编写”。本文由Robert Hof在知名科技媒体SiliconeANGLE上所分享。软件侵吞世界之后，旧的世界逐渐崩塌，新的世界开始重新“编写”。许

作者：T客汇杨丽

关键词：安德森预测，趋势，物联网，移动革命，数据驱动

网站：www.tikehui.com

核心提示：世界万物以互联网为载体连接起来，世界通过软件重新“编写”。

本文由Robert Hof在知名科技媒体SiliconeANGLE上所分享。

软件侵吞世界之后，旧的世界逐渐崩塌，新的世界开始重新“编写”。

许多创业公司都愿意将公司建立在硅谷。这里是高手云集的赛场，也是资本汇集的根据地。像A16z这样的风投公司，手中握有大量的资本，同时也吸引着众多科技公司的眼球。

When the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced its fifth fund a month ago, Managing Director Scott Kupor said the theme for the $1.5 billion fund would remain the same as the previous four: Software is eating the world.

The notion, articulated originally by cofounder Andreessen Andreessen (pictured) five years ago, is that software is disrupting nearly every traditional industry, or eventually will. But this week, Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, recorded a podcast with Kupor and editorial partner Sonal Chokshi that updated the theme. It’s now “Software programs the world.”

硅谷著名投资公司Andreessen Horowitz，简称A16z，最近刚刚结束了第五轮15亿美元的融资。该公司由Marc Andreessen 和Ben Horowitz 共同创建。五年前，Andreessen提出了“软件侵吞世界”（Software is eating the world），而今这个预测正在实现。

A16z管理合伙人Scott Kupor提到，目前依旧是软件侵吞世界。不过，也就在前不久，Andreessen与Horowitz在播客上录制了一期音频，在原有的基础上给这个预测增添了新的解释——软件编写世界（Software programs the world）。

First, a little history: A16z, as the firm is sometimes called, raised its first fund almost exactly seven years ago in the thick of the financial crisis, when everyone thought it was a dumb idea. It turned out to be great, Horowitz said, because there was an unprecedented confluence of three gigantic new platforms: mobile, social, cloud. But we’re coming to the tail end of the first phase of the most obvious applications that leverage two or three of those trends, said Horowitz.

在7年前的金融危机中，A16z竟获得了首轮融资。在当时，所有人都认为这是个愚蠢的想法。不过，事实却粉碎了这一论断。Horowitz提到，这是因为移动、社交、云三者的融合产生了前所未有的影响。但是A16z赶在了第一阶段的末尾，充分把握住了以下三种趋势带来的影响。

Even if that theme doesn’t have quite the bite of the original, it’s always interesting to hear how one of the world’s leading VCs thinks the world of tech and beyond is changing. In the podcast, released July 10, the pair identified several big changes, some very recent, that are informing what they think will be the most promising investments in the next few years.

尽管可能跟之前的预测没有太突出的改变，但是能够听到全球著名VC分享的关于未来科技变化的话题也是非常有价值。这期播客在7月10日播出，两位创始人指出了最近发生的一些重大改变，而且他们认为这些变化将会对未来若干年内的投资风向产生影响。

New trends

新趋势正顺应前一股趋势加速前行

Now, explained his partner, several new trends are piling on top of the previous trends. For one, Andreessen said, since about seven years ago, Moore’s Law, the decades-long reality that the number of transistors on a silicon chip integrated circuit has doubled about every two years, has completely shifted. Instead of meaning the power of chips is doubling for the same price, it’s now that they’re offering the same power for half the price. Thus the mobile revolution.

趋势一：

Andreessen提到，大概七年之前，摩尔定律就已经完全改变了。

多年来，技术的发展一直遵循摩尔定律，即价格不变，硅芯片集成电路上所容纳的元器件的数目，每两年增加一倍，性能也同时提升一倍。也就是说，每隔两年，每一美元所买到的电脑性能就会增加一倍。

之前，同样价格下硅芯片的性能增加一倍。现在，更重要的是，以一般的价格，就能获取同样的硅芯片性能。

这就是移动革命。

But it’s more than that. This is a “a massive deflationary force on tech and I suspect the overall economy,” Andreessen said. “The end state is chips will be free and they will be embedded in everything.”

不过，情况远不止这些。Andreessen认为，IT行业承受着通货紧缩巨大的压力，因而他对整个经济比较担忧。硅芯片最终会是免费的，而且能被嵌入到每个事物身上。

The second trend is that all those chips will be on the Internet. When every physical object is networked, he said, “you can essentially program the world.” Thus the Internet of Things.

趋势二：

所有的硅芯片都在互联网上。当每件物理客体都通过网络进行连接时，软件就能彻底对世界进行编写。

这就是物联网。

Third, the continuation of software eating the world means that software can be applied to all homes, or all businesses, or all cars–industry after industry. “Entrepreneurs just assume that if there’s something to be done in the world, there must be a way to write software to do it,” he said. Thus you see Uber and Airbnb and so on tackling every industry.

趋势三：

软件还在继续侵吞整个世界，这意味着软件能够运用在所有的家庭、企业或汽车行业中。

Andreessen提到，企业家只是假设：如果这个世界还有未完成的事情，那么在软件背后就需要某种编写软件的好方法。

因而有Uber和Airbnb这类公司对所在行业进行颠覆。

That means, said Andreessen that “as a fund, we’re in markets where we wouldn’t have anticipated being in.” The firm has invested in Airbnb in hospitality, Comma.ai in cars, Everlaw in legal services, Honor in senior home care, Instacart in grocery, Lyft in ride-sharing, OpenGov in government data, Soylent in food, and several companies including Branch and Coinbase in financial services.

这意味着，“作为投资人，我们所在的市场是根本无法预料的。”这家风投已经投资了旅行房屋租赁社区Airbnb，无人车技术公司Comma.ai，法律信息存储服务公司Everlaw，高级家庭护理Honor，零售电商Instacart，打车服务商Lyft，政府税收开支信息公开平台OpenGov，懒人食品公司Soylent，以及数十家金融服务公司包括Branch和Coinbase。

The new confluence of trends means that the nature of technology platforms is changing too. Where once a new chip spawned a new operating system platform, now computing is done across lots of chips. Cloud computing is one of the first examples of that. But there’s also Hadoop and Spark for distributed processing, bitcoin for finance, and most recently deep learning neural networks, all inherently distributable across many processors.

新的趋势融合意味着：技术平台的本质也在发生着变化。在过去，一块新芯片便需要新的操作系统平台，而现在计算过程在大量芯片上完成，比如云计算就是一个很好的例子。

但是，Hadoop和Spark的分布式处理，比特币金融，以及最近很火的深度学习神经网络，本质上，也都在许多服务器上进行分布式工作。

Startup opportunities

创业公司抓住机遇

The importance of Big Data in all these applications often has meant the big companies that can amass it hold the cards. But Horowitz said there are still opportunities for Big Data-driven startups in areas where data is still not centralized, such as health care.

He also thinks AI could be applied to creating a better user interface for smartphones using natural language and gestures. And he think new applications that don’t work at all without these more natural interfaces present an opportunity for startups, or at least upstarts–like Amazon.com Inc. with the Echo voice-enabled speaker.

所有这些应用程序上所积累的大数据，一般来说，在大公司才能得到价值的体现。

不过，Horowitz指出，对于某些领域由大数据驱动的初创公司也会有很多机会，在这些领域中如医疗，数据还并没有集中化。

他还认为，在具有自然语言和手势功能的智能手机中，AI还能用于构建一个更加良好的用户界面。此外，如果新应用程序缺少自然语言界面，那么就根本无法工作。这给初创公司或者至少像亚马逊这类的云巨头带来了巨大机会。亚马逊依靠Echo语音话筒进行人工智能的运用。

Yet another reason not to write off startups: The cloud and open source software make it much cheaper and faster for startups to use new data-driven services such as machine learning. And the latest generation of deep learning experts are working on making artificial intelligence work with small data sets, another trend Andreessen said could tilt the playing field more toward startups.

但初创公司拥有胜算的另一个原因在于：云计算和开源软件，使初创公司能够更为迅速并以低价的方式，使用新一代数据驱动服务，如机器学习。目前，深度学习领域最年轻的专家正在利用小数据集驱动人工智能运行。在这一点上，初创公司更具有优势。

Most of all, startups have a chance as more computing moves to the cloud to create applications that couldn’t be done easily with traditional software, including specialized vertical applications. They could be economical to provide in the cloud to a much larger range of medium-sized companies, many outside the U.S. and Europe, that never bought enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in the last big software industry boom.

更为重要的是，随着更多的计算过程转移到云端，搭建的应用程序都无法与传统软件，包括专业化的垂直应用很好地协同。这时，初创公司又逮住了这个机会。初创公司能够在云端更为经济地为更多的公司部署应用。这些公司中有很多都不在美国和欧洲，在最后一个软件繁荣期间也从来没有使用过ERP软件。

But Andreessen implied that there’s plenty of opportunity for many companies. There are $10 trillion in government bonds around the world collectively offering negative yield, which he said means people are searching for more productive places to put capital. “The world has never been more ripe for a large wave of innovation that would be easy to finance,” he said.

但是，Andreessen提醒，很多公司依然还有很大的机会。全球总共有100亿美元的政府债券收益率为负。因此，人们正在找机会高效地利用手中的资本。如今的世界迎来了一大股创新浪潮，公司很容易就能获得融资，现在的时机再好不过。

If all that sounds remarkably optimistic at a time when there’s mounting pessimism in Silicon Valley that billion-dollar unicorns are worth as much as investors had hoped, Andreessen did nod to the uncertain economic environments with some parting advice: Startups should raise their prices.

相比之下，针对硅谷独角兽的价值是否符合投资人预期，目前有一种不断上升的消极态度。因此，Andreessen承认，在这个充满不确定性的经济环境中，建议初创公司应该提升自身产品或服务的价格。

That way, he said, they can afford an adequate sales and marketing effort, the lack of which often dooms the majority of startups that don’t get lucky with a viral product. What’s more, customers take a more expensive product more seriously and they’re more likely to use it after they buy it.

通过这种方式，他们能负担得起足够的销售和市场投入，缺乏这种投入的话，最终结果往往是：大多数初创公司没那么幸运获得病毒式产品增长。

另外，客户还会认为更贵的产品更重要，这样他们才更愿意去购买并使用。

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