APIs for Manufacturing.

Some people freak out when they see movie sets, or space stations, or fire trucks, but for me it has always been factories. I spent some time 2005-2008 wandering in and out of factories in Shenzhen, Dongguan and Chaozhou and what was most surprising was how much is still made by hand. It is not all robots, even remotely.

And modern supply chains were built around that very premise – that hands were needed, and the best way to compete and scale was to find the cheaper hands. But some very interesting rumblings on the periphery of mainstream production (specifically in electronics) indicates not that the need for hands is going away, but that the entire system is evolving in a much more fundamental way.

The latest buzz-phrase-of-late seems to be “hardware is the new software” – and from what I can tell, the significance rests in the idea that the formerly painful process of making software has become a mostly democratized affair that has created many billion dollar companies along the way. The same will soon happen in hardware. And “soon” is used very loosely here. Could be 2, 12, 20, years down the road (ok probably not 2), but it seems near-inevitable that the shift will create many new and interesting companies along the way.