Joking around with no one in particular, I asked which currently had more value – having a generic four-year degree from Anytown University, or an Instagram account with a million followers?

You’re a CEO in the financial sector. Which would you rather have as your corporation’s main asset, a chain of marble-floor main street bank branches or the payment network of Visa or Mastercard?

Reminds me of the Bill Gates review of Capitalism Without Capital.

Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend

Imagine Ford releasing a new model of car. The first car costs a bit more to create, because you have to spend money designing and testing it. But each vehicle after that requires a certain amount of materials and labor. The tenth car you build costs the same to make as the 1000th car. The same is true for the other things that dominated the world’s economy for most of the 20th century, including agricultural products and property.

Software doesn’t work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn’t the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.