Seth’s Blog
Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set out to build an audacious building, there were real doubts about whether you might succeed. It was considered a marvel if your building was a little taller and didn’t fall down. Now, of course, the hard part of real estate development has nothing to do with whether or not your building is going to collapse.
The same thing is true of software. It’s a given that a professionally run project will create something that runs. Good (not great) software is a matter of will, mostly.
The question used to be: Does it run? That was enough, because software that worked was scarce.
Now, the amount of high utility freeware and useful free websites is soaring. Clearly, just writing a piece of software no longer makes it a business.
So if it’s not about avoiding fatal bugs, what’s the business of software?
At its heart, you need to imagine (and then execute) a business that just happens to involve a piece of software, because it’s become clear that software alone isn’t the point. There isn’t a supply issue–it’s about demand. The business of software is now marketing (which includes design).
The internet has transformed the software industry in two vaguely related ways:
1. It makes it far more efficient to communicate with people who might buy your software and,
2. It enables software’s most powerful function: communication between users
…. more in Seth’s Blog: The business of software.