The Software Superpowers

Back to King’s

It felt familiar walking into the Macadam Building at King’s College London again. The same views over the Thames and the buzz of being on the top-floor. Thirty years ago, that room turned into a nightclub after dark; now it’s a lecture theatre. Today it hums with different possibilities.

I told the students that my lecture was a chance to look at how technology markets organise themselves; how a few players end up shaping the systems we depend on, and how smaller companies still find room to create meaningful value inside them. Because once you see the pattern, you can decide how to move within it.

Where the Power Lies

Twenty years ago, analyst Joseph Bentzel coined the phrase “the software superpowers.” Even then, Microsoft’s R&D budget was larger than that of Silicon Valley combined.

That imbalance has since exploded. In 2024, Microsoft spent over $30 billion on research and development, Amazon more than $80 billion, and Alphabet roughly $50 billion. Together, they now invest more in innovation each year than most countries spend on defence. These are the firms that build and control the platforms the rest of us rely on.

It’s just basic physics. Software scales, and data compounds. Once a company reaches a certain level of integration and capital, its flywheel speeds up: billions more to improve what already works, while the rest of the world rents the outcome.

It’s like gravity. And gravity doesn’t care what you think about it, it simply there to bring you back down to earth. The real question is how you move within a landscape.

Learning to Ride the Gravity

When I co-founded the software company CloudSense, I learned that lesson up close.

Telecoms was transforming; shifting from single-product sales (mobile, broadband, TV) into bundles and subscriptions. The old systems weren’t built for that world.

We built software that sat in the middle, helping companies configure, price, and quote those complicated offers. The industry called it CPQ, but what it did was serve humans: it helped customers understand what they were buying, and helped businesses keep their promises.

One of the most important decision we made was both technical and strategic. We built CPQW on Salesforce’s platform. They had trust, reach, and scale and they needed CPQ. So they gave us a lift we would probably never have created alone.

We werer practising ecosystem thinking before we had a name for it. Instead of fighting for attention, we’d attached ourselves to a platform with its own centre of gravity and that gave us credibility, customers, and growth.

But gravity pulls downwards.

When Salesforce backed a new competitor — one aligned more closely with their own plan, we were caught off guard. Our success had tied us to their orbit, so that when they moved, we felt the pull.

That was on me. Our attention was so directed onto our own progress, that we overlooked key external factors that gave value to our innovations.

Getting Back in the Game

So what do you do when the tide turns?

In our case, we specialised. We doubled down on the niche where we already had credibility; telecoms and media. We started building very focused industry specific features ourselves and began partnering more deeply with sector specialists.

And we listened carefully to customers. We deepened trust with customers so that they came to see us as valued sector specialists.

The lesson I wanted the students to take was that ecosystems favour those who pay attention. The market is a set of moving relationships, and your job as a business leader is to read them early.

Finding the Gaps That Matter

Every ecosystem has edges; places that aren’t strategic for the super power platform owner but matter to the users it serves. That’s where small companies can build real depth; by riding on the opportunities out there on the edge.

I told the students: don’t chase the shiny bit of that ecosystem map. Pay attention to the pieces that are missing. If you continue to hone the platform experience for its users, you’ll continue to earn the right to have relevance and protection.

A moment may come when your niche becomes too attractive, the platform’s gaze will shift and I told the students that this is the time to evolve, diversify, or move on. This awareness is the real craft of ecosystem strategy.

Teaching, Not Preaching

The mood in the lecture was relaxed. We laughed about the 1990s sound system that would never pass a PA test today. But underneath the jokes was a serious question: how do you recognise change while you’re operating inside it?

It is easy to only notice change when it’s already happened. It is better in my experience to develop a peripheral vision where we keep noticing the patterns of change just outside your primary focus, while they are happening.

Recognising that nothing stays still helps us stay relevant and maintain agency.

And that’s why understanding can be more important than knowledge. Knowledge is what you recall. Understanding is what you use. Perhaps wisdom is is recognising the diference?

The Next Wave of the Superpowers

We ended where every technology conversation ends now, with AI.

The same companies that dominated the software era are building the foundations of intelligence: the models, the data, the compute. Their R&D budgets have gone from tens of billions to hundreds. The scale is difficult to imagine.

And the pattern is familiar. A few players create the infrastructure; everyone else builds on top. It’s the same gravity, amplified.

So I left the students with a question: in this unfamiliar landscape, what roles will you play when AI rewrites the map?