Closing: The Thesis
Every technological revolution ultimately changes a price. The steam engine changed the price of power. The assembly line — and then China — changed the price of manufactured goods. Global delivery — and India — changed the price of technology services. The cloud changed the price of software distribution. Artificial intelligence now changes the price of software creation — the last price in the stack that never fell.
That change will not be captured by today’s software companies adding coding assistants to existing teams; every competent company will do that, and it will cancel out. It will be captured by institutions redesigned around a new assumption — that software creation is no longer scarce. They will build foundries, not workshops. They will sell utility, not feature volume. They will industrialise quality as aggressively as speed. And they will expand access rather than merely undercut prices — because the largest market is not the customers the incumbents overcharge, but the ones they never reached at all.
The first era of software was about invention — making the impossible possible. The second was about distribution and scale — making it available to every organisation that could pay. The third will be about industrial production and abundance — making it available to everyone else.
Which brings me back to a book I read thirty-five years ago. Cusumano’s Japanese factories were not wrong; they were early. Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC and Fujitsu had the right ambition and the right disciplines — reuse, process, statistical quality — but they were industrialising everything around the craftsman while the craftsman remained the unit of production. The idea then waited three decades for its missing ingredient. I returned to India in 1992 dreaming of building software products, watched two of them fail, and filed the phrase “software factory” away with the other dreams that arrive before their time. It turns out the dream was not dead. It was waiting — for the production function itself to change, and perhaps for a country that had spent those same three decades mastering process, delivery and affordability to be ready to build it. The factory Japan imagined, the foundry can now deliver — and this time, it can be built from India.
China showed the world that industrial production could make physical products affordable. India showed the world that distributed talent could make technology services affordable. AI now makes possible the third affordability revolution — in which high-quality software itself becomes available to every business, not only those able to pay yesterday’s prices.
That is the promise of the software foundry. Not more software. Software for many more people.
