This is completely true until software eats their industry up as it almost invariably does. Just in the examples provided by the author, insurance is undergoing a shift to direct-to-consumer, and I firmly believe that mobile apps are going to become super important differentiators in that industry. Real estate takes longer to take the sledgehammer to because of entrenched agents' smart use of regulation as a moat, but it's clearly coming next.

Put another way, a company's organization can be seen as its software, except it's running on a kind of wet, carbon-based hardware that does certain things much better than the silicon-based ones, and other things much worse. As the capabilities of the silicon-based computer increase relative to the capabilities of the carbon-based, there are few industries where it would be wise to continue purchasing software like one purchases pencils.

The incumbents don't always have to be "eaten". Was banking swallowed up by new tech companies? No, banks gradually increased their use of software and adapted.

A lot of advances are gradual, and if you are a large company you will have time to react.

Oh right I didn't mean that a different breed of "tech company" gets to outcompete incumbents, just that an industry's prevailing view of software as "just another cost center" cedes way over time to software as core to the business — which can happen through internal transformation or through external disruption. Software eventually becomes a core component of almost every industry.

I agree with you 100%. However, I think one of the aspects of "bad" software that is misunderstood is the increased risk of catastrophic failure. Two applications might have no perceivable difference from the user perspective. But one was built to withstand attack or corruption of the database, and the other was not.