Evans: Shenzhen hardware manufacturing functions like open-source software
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Software is What Distinguishes the Hardware Winners · Jan 2, 2019 · at 5:47
Benedict Evans, tech analyst at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses how modular electronics supply chains in Shenzhen allow hardware creators to iterate physical products as fast as software.
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“In a funny kind of way, you could almost, it's kind of an imperfect analogy, but you can also Almost argue that like the user experience and the injection molded plastic and so on has become software. That is to say in a kind of, there's a sort of analogy in here that you've got the sort of the underlying physical components of the chips, but then you wrap them and repurpose them, you know, almost overnight into different things. And so just as you know, you can take a piece of open source software and make this or that or the other thing out of it and put a new UI on it and it can be a message board or it can be a social network or it can be an consumer insurance platform, but it's the same underlying software. You have the same thing in Shenzhen, which is you take the same basic chips and the same basic supply chains and manufacturing, you know, manufacturing lines, and it can be lapel, and it can be lapel mics, it can be hoverboards, it can be drones, it can be a three-d printer, based on, you know, where the market's going.”
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