Software is eating (and) Biology
68% of the businesses registered in our service Graypes, from January 2020 as of today, March 2021, under the technology sector of Medicine and Biology are in reality Software companies!
The remaining 22% of the companies provide Medical devices or Biological substances.
“Hardware is becoming Software”
Many years ago, as an undergraduate student of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, I had the tendency to follow primarily the hardware curriculum. Digital, Analog, VLSI, PCB design, were all tangible and “material”. Real pieces of evidence of engineering achievements.
Software at that time, the early ’90s, without the Internet and a lot of “MS-DOS”, looked to me more as an ingredient of a robust hardware component and less as an autonomous product.
But my professor, and a great alternative thinker, Dr. A. Tsakalidis, had a different approach:
“ Carrasco, don’t spend your time at the hardware labs;
study the Software.
Hardware is already becoming Software! “
Software is Eating the Hardware
And indeed, Dr. A. Tsakalidis correctly identified the continuous use of software tools and programs for the design automation of digital systems or VLSI components.
Software languages, like VHDL, have been developed for the description, design, and simulation of hardware components.
Software Is Eating the World
A few years later, Marc Andreessen, in his famous article, originally published in The Wall Street Journal, on August 20, 2011, clearly outlined the software dominance:
“More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services — from movies to agriculture to national defense”
Software Is Eating Biology
A decade later, it’s already obvious that the promising discoveries in modern medicine are more likely to originate from software companies like DeepMind rather than biological laboratories!
And, paraphrasing Marc Andreessen’s famous quote, as it is also proven with facts from our business analytics in Graypes:
Software is Eating Biology and Medicine!
(you can read the initial publication at: https://www.cyclyst.net/ )