Software is eating the world (2011)

It's quite a stretch to call AT&T and Verizon's dominance based on "software". It's actually more than a stretch, it's simply wrong. Those two companies are dominant (to this day, 4 years later) not because of software but despite their desperate and failing attempts to be relevant in the software world. The dominance is quite simply the result of a monopoly on physical resources, in this case, frequencies and large-scale cell tower infrastructure that's hard to copy without huge new investments in ... ahem... hardware.

Original HN discussion from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905410

And an interesting follow-up discussion from a few days later:

"If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2919708

"ain't nobody got time for that!"