Peter Levine, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), outlines common failure modes in open-source business models during a strategic presentation.
Assertion Supported
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”
Opinion
Levine: Traditional imperative logic programming is reaching the end of its lifecycle
“I believe that programming is sort of in the life cycle of Programming is sort of at the end. Like, you can only write so many if-then-else statements. You're kind of done with logic, right, in that sense.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2022
Disk drives, tape drives, and SSDs will all go away
“We will have much more in-memory data, systems that literally live in real memory, and the notion of disk drives and tape drives and even SSDs will all go away.”
Opinion
Levine: Google and Facebook infrastructure is more advanced than AWS
“I think that the Google and Facebook infrastructure is now moving in my opinion, more advanced than what Amazon is. Amazon was created several, many, sort of, already generations ago, relative to this commoditization curve.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: The replacement of cloud computing is already underway
“About six months ago, I started to think, well, what happens when cloud computing goes away? You know, of course, to myself, I'm like, well, it's so popular, and now how could it go away? I think it's actually happening right under our nose, and let me show yo…”
Prediction Partly held up
Levine: Machine learning applications will execute at edge endpoints, not the cloud
“So the only way that we can look into an image or look into the massive amounts of data is with machine learning, and that machine learning, the algorithms and the applications employing machine learning will run at the end point. It's not going to be machine …”