You know how some online software apps say they’re “powered” by some other software? Like “powered by Inktomi” or “powered by Netscape Navigator” (I’m totally showing my age here).
Obviously, that doesn’t mean literal power. Literally, they’re powered by the electric cable connecting their server to the wall socket. That in turn is powered by breaking chemical bonds of the carbon in coal, or capturing the kinetic energy of falling water or blowin’ in the wind. All of which ultimately comes from the Sun, du Soleil, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
This refers to hardware, not software, of course, but practically software is meaningless unless you power up the hardware.
I’m guessing they made up a new sense of the verb to power that specially means something one software program does for another?
Good guess. It’s fundamentally marketing-speak that the pretty face of the software you’re looking at has other software as its engine. (Hence, “power”.)
“Engine” isn’t strictly a marketing affectation, however. It’s a standard term-of-art in software engineering that calls standardized software executing the core functions of a software package an engine. For instance, various game platforms or web platforms.
The distance from “software engine” to “powered by” is pretty short.
To be powered by something can be more than just supplying it with energy, it could be providing another form of impetus. In the software sense, this would be code that assists in making the software do what it does. Something “powered by Netscape Navigator” would be a program that utilizes Netscape’s HTML rendering engine, either a program that incorporates HTML or perhaps a website designed to be best interpreted by Netscape’s engine.
Likewise, a modern video game might be described as “Powered by the Havok Physics engine” which means rather than writing their own complicated and tedious physics simulation code the game developers chose to use a pre-made physics engine specially designed to be slotted into different games.
And yes, like gnoitall says, the way “engine” comes up often in programming lends itself readily to metaphors about power and speed.
This isn’t limited to software, either. If a vehicle is said to be “Ford powered”, it doesn’t mean Ford is supplying the energy; it means they manufactured the engine. Software engines get the same treatment.
What gives a ruler power, e.g. in the expression “Henry the Eighth was a powerful monarch.” Clay Davis was a powerful state senator. He derived his power from his personal connections. He was powered by greed. Margaret Thatcher wielded her power with an iron fist.
Lots of uses of the word that don’t involve literal energy.
One I saw just a few minutes ago was an online crossword puzzle. The layout of the puzzle and the clues were designed by someone working for the New York Times, but the interface, where you can hit tab to go to the next clue and it skips over letters you already have while you’re typing and the spacebar toggles between across and down, and so forth, was created by a separate company. And yet a third company was hosting it. So it was “The Seattle Times presents the New York Times crossword puzzle, powered by pzzl.com”, or some such.
I don’t find that nearly as irritating as the corporate buzzspeak phrase “____ is in our DNA”, repeated by people who couldn’t even sound out “deoxyribonucleic acid” if you spelled it for them phonetically.
I’ve seen this sort of thing for computers with Intel processors, using the phrases “Intel inside” or “powered by Intel” and at one point, if computer manufacturers mentioned the Intel processor in their commercials, it would be followed by the Intel bong sound. I think the idea was that Intel would contribute to the computer manufacturer’s advertising budget for these mentions.
(As a cite, see this page from Intel, which says, “While Intel promoted the Intel Inside logo in ads of its own, the campaign depended heavily on a cooperative endeavor in which the company provided subsidies to OEMs who included the logo on their own products and ads, thus encouraging consumers to think about the processors inside the devices they bought and recognize Intel as a sign of quality and innovation. By the end of 1992, over five hundred OEMs had signed onto the cooperative marketing program and 70 percent of OEM ads that could carry the logo did so.”)