These are Andreessen’s own words. The sentence — printed as “In short, software is eating the world.” — closes the opening of his Wall Street Journal essay “Why Software Is Eating The World,” published 20 August 2011; the WSJ article page is preserved as a print-to-PDF capture ↗. Quote Investigator ↗ documents him using the line earlier still, in an October 2000 interview.
“Software is eating the world” Marc Andreessen, "Why Software Is Eating The World," The Wall Street Journal, 20 August 2011 — "In short, software is eating the world." Verified by Quotle.info.
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In context
Evoking the world of Marc Andreessen — Netscape co-founder & Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Theme: "Software is eating the world". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Why Software Is Eating The World
Published
The Wall Street Journal, Essay section, 20 August 2011
Author
Marc Andreessen (bylined “By MARC ANDREESSEN”)
Earlier use
CRN, Issue 915, 9 October 2000 — interview with Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, per Quote Investigator
In short, software is eating the world.
Essay opening
The sentence lands at the end of the essay’s opening, after Andreessen notes Hewlett-Packard’s move away from PCs toward software and Google’s planned purchase of Motorola Mobility, and calls both part of a trend he has been watching.
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Print-to-PDF capture of the WSJ article page (PDF)
October 2000 — the earliest use documented by Quote Investigator ↗: Andreessen says “Software is eating the world” in a CRN interview with Ben Horowitz, Issue 915, 9 October 2000.
The essay was first published in 2011 and is well within copyright in the United States; rights rest with the author and The Wall Street Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Company. Quotle.info reproduces only the single thesis sentence for identification and comment; the full text is available at the author’s firm, a16z.com ↗.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
What gets garbled
The attribution to Andreessen is not in doubt. What travels badly is the date, the exact wording, and the line’s many descendants.
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Date of origin“He coined it in 2011” Half right
The 2011 essay made the phrase famous, but Quote Investigator ↗ records Andreessen saying “Software is eating the world” in a CRN interview with Ben Horowitz published 9 October 2000, in the Loudcloud era.
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WordingThe headline quoted as the quote Mis-worded
The essay is headlined “Why Software Is Eating The World”; the sentence inside it reads “In short, software is eating the world.” Variants such as “software will eat the world” also circulate — Quote Investigator lists them ↗ alongside the primary form.
✓Andreessen wrote it, in the Wall Street Journal of 20 August 2011 — and, on the evidence Quote Investigator gathered ↗, had been saying it for years before that.
Context
Why it mattered
When Andreessen wrote it, the argument was contrarian: technology stocks were trading at low price/earnings ratios and commentators were asking whether Facebook-era valuations were a second bubble. His answer was that the market had the story backwards — that software companies were about to take over large parts of the wider economy, industry by industry.
The line survived because it is a thesis compressed into five words. It became shorthand for a whole decade of investment logic, and then a template: every subsequent hype cycle has borrowed the grammar of “X is eating Y.”
In short, software is eating the world.
How the essay aged
Writing on the tenth anniversary, CIO Dive ↗ called the piece “oft-quoted” and reported that enterprise software spending had grown from roughly $269 billion to about $600 billion over that period.
Not everyone agreed at the time or since; a VentureBeat column of October 2011 ran under the flat rebuttal “Software is not eating the world,” as Quote Investigator notes ↗.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Born 1971 · Netscape co-founder & Silicon Valley venture capitalist
Marc Andreessen (born 9 July 1971 in Cedar Falls, Iowa) co-wrote Mosaic, the browser that put inline images on the web, then co-founded Netscape. In 2009 he co-founded the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz. He is one of the few technologists whose off-hand formulations become industry doctrine — and this is the most quoted of them.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating The World,” The Wall Street Journal, Essay, 20 August 2011. Republished in full by Andreessen Horowitz. Earlier documented use: CRN, Issue 915, 9 October 2000 (per Quote Investigator).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Software is eating the world’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/software-is-eating-the-world/