Nodes will dethrone tech giants - from Apple to Google

Decentralized systems are slowly putting power back in the hands of developers and users, and taking it away from big tech companies.

Though highly regarded even at the time of writing, Marc Andreessen's seminal 2011 essay, "Why Software Is Eating the World," turned out to be even more prophetic than it first appeared. at the time. On the cusp of a decade where software would prove invaluable to almost every aspect of modern life, Andreessen asserted that every company was now ostensibly a software company, whether he liked it or not.

Adapting his argument to many companies that were market leaders at the time, his ideas ended up also applying to companies that hadn't fully defined their markets or didn't even exist yet, but would continue to generate billions of dollars in market share: Uber, Lyft, TikTok/ByteDance, Robinhood and Coinbase, among several others. If you were to be a unicorn in the 21st century, software would probably be key to earning that horn.

The hidden driver behind this complete disruption of modern economies and lives was the emergence of true giants of cloud computing and the cloud, an industry in which Andreessen himself had pioneered at a time when many computer scientists internal and external scoffed at the notion.

During the second decade of the 21st century, they weren't making fun at all. In the 2010s, global spending on cloud computing increased more than fivefold, from $77 billion to $411 billion. It was the backbone of what made everything accessible at the push of a button on the computer in our pocket.

Related: Facebook and Twitter will soon be obsolete thanks to blockchain technology

But there was a great cost in doing so...