If the Economy Booms, Thank Software
Microsoft’s renaissance may herald a nascent boom in software-driven productivity and economic growth
Like-minded technological evangelists have long argued artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and other technological advances were about to unleash a new boom. But the boom refused to show: growth in productivity—the best measure of how technology enhances worker output—remained mired near generational lows.
Recently, however, there have been intriguing signs a boom may be in the offing. In the first quarter, American companies for the first time invested more in software than in information-technology equipment. Indeed, outside of buildings and other structures, software surpassed every type of investment, including transportation equipment such as trucks and industrial equipment such as machine tools. Software spending is even higher if the cost of writing original software programs, now classified as research and development, is included.
Adjusted for inflation, software investment grew 11% from the first quarter of 2018 through the first quarter of 2019. By contrast, investment in equipment grew less than 4% and in structures, just 1%. (Revised data are due out Thursday.) The headwinds buffeting capital spending broadly, whether the waning tax cut, trade war or slumping commodity prices, have largely spared software. Meanwhile, productivity growth has picked up to 2.4% in the past year, the fastest since 2010.
Whether that can continue is debatable: business investment and productivity growth appear to have slowed in the current quarter. Nonetheless, a recent survey by Morgan Stanley & Co. found chief information officers planning to boost software budgets this year by 5%, and hardware budgets just 2%. Their main target is cloud computing, under which businesses pay external providers to host their data and supply tools to analyze that data.
After Chief Executive Satya Nadella took the company’s reins in 2014, Microsoft shifted focus to cloud-based services. Dubbed “Azure,” the services now account for half of the company’s revenue. Microsoft lacks the hipness factor of consumer-facing Amazon, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. Yet it has achieved comparable growth by making itself a partner for businesses bent on “digital transformation,” a nebulous term that means using technology to remake processes or products.