Software's* Value
We currently live in an era with a lot of value on software, data, and connections, AI, etc.
To me, there are two separations in ways that software companies are valued: Attention & Selling.
Attention: Platforms like Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, use attention to help sell products.
Selling: Only in the way that the software assists with a "sale" - value is provided. Amazon, Shopify, etc.
There are other companies that do not fit this mould precisely, though I am not writing this to be a concrete category but rather some observations. Other companies like Nvidia are "Selling", but their company cannot be simply summarised to "selling hardware" - their business is hyper-complex and their GPU sales do assist in people doing work that assists in selling in other avenues - a "selling catalyst" company.
Another is Salesforce. They sell software, an incredible relational-yet-graph database product, including incredible connections, app marketplace, and other sales tooling. These are operational, and assist other companies in selling themselves - so they are neither "Selling" nor "Attention" neatly - so this must not be binary categories (unless one is making a time or 'lindy effect' argument).
Another is manufacturing as a whole. Cars, SpaceX, woodworking, guitar manufacturing - these are value-add enterprises where software would only add value insofar as it assists in reducing op-costs (time, transport, etc), or increases sales (more leads like Salesforce, etc).
Another is OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of the AI tooling ecosystem. The are they operate is in that gap between the cost of human cognition, energy cost to operate the task, the error rate or percieved error rate (very different), and the value of parallelisation and little bootstrapping costs. This all then needs to be funneled to sale chains in order for the companies to enjoy continuing to pay for tokens.
An interesting principle of Apple - Steve Jobs quoted line from Alan Kay of ~"if you're serious about software - build your own hardware". The experience starts with performant hardware tuned to the software outcomes. Apple themselves are hardware + software.
If your software is valuable, it's apart of the chain that gets products sold.
* Software = Technology.