First, software is diagnosed as being the “least capital-intensive and most knowledge-intensive of all information technologies to emerge” (p.290) which lead to low barriers to market-entry and immense opportunities for start-ups. Second, the fact that IBM chose to market the IBM-PC as an open hardware platform and Windows’ dominance as a standardized platform for application development created a gigantic market where even niche products could find a considerable audience. For Chandler and Cortada, the “story” of software is not so much the epic battle between operating systems that we love to dwell on but the development of applications. Their story goes like this:

Although software development is very much a knowledge business, the personal commitment required to learn enough to write software is far less than is needed by a computer scientist who is developing either hardware or the next generation of computer chips. The teenager or college student who writes software and ultimately finds a distributor has far less training in the field than the engineer working on Intel’s future product line. Yet both arrive at the same point: they create a marketable product. Thus, in economic terms, software so far has required less intellectual capital, hence offering fewer knowledge barriers to new entrants. Will that change? Perhaps, but what occurred in the 1980s and 1990s is that the barriers to entry remained far lower than for any previous form of information technology and products. (p.296f)

So far so good. This account has been echoed repeatedly (my colleague Mirko Schäfer and I have been amongst the many) but Chandler and Cortada weave a pretty dense and economically sound argument. What is interesting though is the historical backdrop against which the emergence of software unfolds:

In the electronic-based industries on which the Information Age rests, opportunities for individual entrepreneurs to build long-term competitive enterprises also came primarily with the introduction of a new technology. But these opportunities only occurred three times. The first was in the early 1920s with the coming of broadcasting. The second opportunity occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after the introduction of IBM’s System 360 and Digital’s PDP series greatly expanded computerized data processing for commercial activities. The third took place in the first half of the 1950s with the sudden and unexpected coming of the multi-billion-dollar microcomputer industry. Since the mid-1950s opportunities for entrepreneurial start-ups in hardware arose primarily in the production of specialized niche products or for providers of supplies and services to the large established core companies. So if history is any guide, a small number of large complex enterprises, particularly those experienced in building systems, will continue to lead in commercializing the hardware for today’s Information Age.

For the authors, software is different, for the reasons given above. Now, what seems to have happened over the last three years is something that is bringing software incrementally back to the “normal” course of history: the app store and the cloud. To provide a cloud based service, a little coding skill is obviously no longer enough – building a datacenter is not that easy and even cloud hosting services that scale well do not eliminate the need for handing the software logistics of a large user base and huge amounts of data. Mastering synchronization between cloud and client, handling different versions of data points, providing clients to various different (mobile) platforms, etc. requires pretty neat skills and a team of experts. In short, the cloud makes software service development much more capital-intensive (Chandler and Cortada’s first argument) and quickly raises barriers to market entry. Just look at how many billions Mircosoft dumped into search technology for some scraps of the market.

The app store story is a little more complex because – just like Windows – the iPhone SDK and store combo has created a market that is standardized and quite large, affording a new business model for many a developer. But with all the technical limitations (since I got an Android phone the fact that I don’t have a common file storage area on the iPad just feels very, very weird) and the filtering, I would argue that the logic of the app store (at least in its Apple version, but Google also has its kill switch) is halfway between the classic logic of operating systems and the television market where independent studios and production companies sell content to the all powerful networks. The independent journalist that sells copy to newspapers and magazines also comes to mind.

While the software market – despite the long-standing existence of software giants – continues to be a pretty diverse playing field, the process of commodification of software via the cloud and the app store may very well be a step away from software as usual, a kind of historic “normalization” to a situation where a limited number of companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft?) dominate or shape a large portion of the market for software.

In the philosophy of mathematics, there are many different positions. The realist stance for example holds that mathematical objects exist. For the platonist, they exist in some kind of extra spatio-temporal realm of ideas. For the physicalist, they are intrinsically connected to material existence, even if that relationship is not necessarily simple. Then there is formalism and this is where things get interesting. In a tale we can read in many social sciences and humanities books on the computer, there is the young Kurt Gödel that smashes the coherent world of the “establishment” mathematician David Hilbert, inventing the metamathematical tools that will later prove essential for the practical realization of computing machinery in the process. What is most often overlooked in that story is that Hilbert’s formalist position is already an extremely important step in the preparation for what is to come. For Hilbert, the question of the ontological status of mathematical objects is already a no-go – truth is no longer defined via any kind of correspondence to an external system but as a function of the internal coherence of the symbolic system. As Bettina Heintz says, Hilbert’s work rendered mathematical concepts “self-sufficient” (autark) by liberating them from any kind of external benchmark and opening a purely mechanical world where symbolic machinery can be built at will, like in a game.

If we want to think about computing today, I think we should remember this break from an ontological concept of truth to a purely formalistic one (even if that mean Gödel put a pretty big crack in it lateron). Because in a way, programming is like a “game” with formulas and if the algorithm works, that means it is “true”. In this sense, Google’s PageRank algorithm is true. But without the reference to an external system, this “truth” is purely mechanical, internal. In a similar way, an algorithm’s claim to objectivity, impartiality, or neutrality should be seen as internal only. The moment we apply mathematics to the description of some external mechanism (gravity, for example), there is a second truth criterion that intervenes, which refers to the establishment of correspondence between the formal system and the external reality. In the same way, if an algorithm is applied to, let’s say the filtering of information, the formal world of the game is mapped onto another world. There is an important difference however. When mathematics are applied to physical phenomena, the gesture is descriptive and epistemological (verb: is). When an algorithms is applied to tasks such as information filtering, the gesture is prescriptive and political (verb: ought).

The fact than an automatic procedure works makes it true in a formal sense. The moment we apply it to a certain task, other criteria intervene. Hilbert’s formalism pulled mathematics from the empirical world and if we bring the two together again by writing software, the criteria by which we judge the quality of that action should be seen as political because there are no mathematical criteria to judge the mapping of on world onto the other. No Hilbert to hold our hand…