This is an interesting prediction. I guess we’re already there if you think of Google Search as a function that takes in a string and returns a list of URLs. But it’s a thought provoking exercise to try reducing a company’s core competency to the functions it implements.
Now, obviously Google Search has more than one or two people working on that function. But it’s a billion dollar function nonetheless. Others that likely already qualify: geocoding, face recognition, machine translation. All have simple input with high backend complexity.
Good question for a software company: what’s your billion dollar function? For Facebook it’s arguably the* function that advertisers call to put ads in front of users. The defensibility comes from their database.
* Not quite a single function today, but probably could be.
* Not quite a single function today, but probably could be.
This concept is perhaps less useful for companies with significant offline components. Uber’s function could be to take in two (x,y) coordinates & move you between them. I guess you could say it’s a function where the state it updates is your GPS position. Not as elegant though.
