Marc Andreessen On The Future Of The Enterprise | Hacker News Reader

Marc Andreessen On The Future Of The Enterprise

techcrunch.com

70 pointsmirceagoia15 comments

What are the valuations of all the discussed startups versus those of the old guard enterprise businesses? What about revenue?

We live by the new style enterprise tools in our firm but I also interact on a daily business with SMEs as well as large multinationals. By and large, outside the software industry, this supposed wave being discussed is not nearly as large or fast as suggested.

I'm not saying it won't eventually grow much larger but I'm also not convinced that IBM, Oracle, SAP et al won't catch on in time to capture significant market share themselves. Further the more I look at mature enterprise firms like Salesforce the more they resemble a traditional big iron firm - only without the hardware sales.

I work in financial software and many of the tools used by large companies are surprisingly archaic. I think there is a lot of opportunity in this space, but change is slow. What I think is going to happen is that non tech startups which heavily use new technology will displace the old.

For instance companies like wealthfront will eventually have an advantage over most financial advisors because the company is built on technology from the ground up. This might take awhile, but I think it is inevitable.

I also wouldn't rule out Microsoft - some of their high end enterprise products (Dynamics AX 2012 in particular) are really rather nice.

It's ironic that people in Silicon Valley talk about how the enterprise is changing and yet almost all of them still practice one of the oldest customs of keeping the workforce in the same physical location.

"And so all the software basically wants to be in the same place, and it wants to be in the place where all the open source software is."

This doesn't really make sense to me. I can use open source software from anywhere. I'm not convinced that there is some huge enterprise business out of that logic.

What I got from that comment is that open source begets open source. With all the forking, related projects want to be hosted together. And with all the developers contributing to many projects, it's a social graph with a lot of gravity.

His comments about github were great. It is refreshing to see entrepreneurs that don't think the objective of entrepreneurship is landing a good valuation from the VCs. It is more refreshing to see a VC that can respect that.

So Marc now knows it all?

Every day they keep asking him about stuff and then "Marc this" and "Marc that". I am about to switch morning cereal but gonna wait until he suggests one...

edit: noticed the negative votes, still wouldn't change a word.

Watch out: you might piss off the fanboys who don't realise that TechCrunch is not the Internet.

pmarca certainly doesn't know it all, but he's got better visibility into the whole spectrum of tech companies than almost anyone, as well as personal experience at both consumer and enterprise over something like 20 years now. (pg probably has better visibility into a certain category of early startup, but pmarca has breadth).

So, even if you assume people like that are only of average intelligence, it's probably worth listening to what they have to say. i.e. if a tall guy at a concert starts running in a certain direction, you may want to follow him.

The annoying thing is that since he's on the HP board, he can't talk about HP (what is up with HP?) or any other big competitors. :(

He does, you know, do this stuff for a living.

He does, you know, do this stuff for a living.

What is "this stuff" exactly? All I know that he is very famous and had an illustrious past. Now they are throwing lots of money around trying to buy legitimacy as VCs. Maybe it's the sites I visit, but he's always in the news saying something.

He doesn't need to "buy" anyone's legitimacy, and he's not just famous. Do your research.

He's Marc fucking Andreessen. He founded Netscape Communications, which he took public and then sold to AOL for $4.2B in 1999, becoming AOL's CTO. Then he founded Loudcloud, which went public in 2001, later being acquired by HP for $1.6B.

He's now a founding partner of one of the most prestigious software-oriented venture capital firms, Andreessen-Horowitz. Their investment portfolio includes Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, and GitHub.

I'd say if any single person is equipped to understand the ebb and flow of the software industry as it relates to the financial markets, it'd be him.

Their investment portfolio includes Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, and GitHub.

I've done my research. Do yours, especially his timing and price entry points.

Adding to your comment, here's a link: http://www.cnbc.com/id/50025913/HP039s_Autonomy_Fiasco_Look_... There's no doubt that Marc is a success in the software & VC space - how much of that is luck and opportunism is up to you to decide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com