Why do we need so much software?

April 18, 2013

Software is everywhere, but you can’t see it.  You know it’s in your phone, your computer, your home appliances and your electric meter, but do you know why?  This article explores the reasons for the explosion of software.

 

Computers have taken over many functions that used to be performed by other equipment and by people.  While computers were originally developed to compute, they now control, communicate and manage things that require much more than just “computing.”

Moore’s Law is the term used to describe the geometric increase over the past 50 years of the number of electronic digital circuits that can be placed on a fixed-size piece of silicon.  A corresponding decrease in the cost of those circuits has driven the digital revolution – replacing nearly everything that used electrical or electronic circuits with their digital equivalent.

A “digital equivalent” of course is not really equivalent, because it consists of a computer.  Each computer, no matter how small or large, includes a processor, memory, and ways of moving data in and out.  All of the activity in a processor happens as a result of executing a program – a series of instructions that are stored in the memory.  And programs are software.

Managing the activities of a computer requires – a computer.  The operating system of a computer is the set of programs that are concerned with managing resources and activities inside the computer.  This is not trivial, because programs are constructed of very simple instructions, and there are a lot of resources and lots of activities inside each computer.  For example, what happens when data is moved in or out of the computer?  Where does it get stored?  How does it get checked and how does it get moved to a more permanent location, such as a disk?  These are all activities an operating system is concerned with.

Keeping track of stored data usually is done by a file system, which is another part of most operating systems.  Turning power on and off for parts of the system that are not used all of the time is another function of system software on, for example, a mobile phone.  This extends the battery life.

Furthermore, thousands of conditions can occur while the computer is operating, such as errors in moving data or interruptions due to user interaction (like typing on a keyboard or touching a screen icon).  Each condition has to be dealt with in a way that won’t stop the computer.

As computers have become widely used, specialized programs have come to be part of the standard repertoire.  Programs dealing with databases (such as a customer list with all of their purchases), audio and video data (such as YouTube videos and podcasts), and photos (such as your smartphone pictures) have become standard requirements for computers that we use in business and at home.

Communications systems – including the Internet – have incorporated computers to manage delivery of data globally; and services such as Google have developed enormous dictionaries of everything on the Internet (and also things like videos and books) that can be searched.  The hardware of each of these, while massive and widespread, is dwarfed by the effort put into creating software that keeps them running and delivering the latest services.

Competition between the latest start-ups today is mostly in the domain of software.  Delivering new services in the Internet age requires deep understanding of software and how to leverage what was developed by others last week to make something new this week.

Software and the tools for developing it are the context in which the best and brightest of the current generation are expressing their creativity and becoming part of the global economy.  You can expect more software from more software designers to result in a lot of unexpected new products and services.

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Loss Leader

January 26, 2008

My colleague Joel Harrison is good at encapsulating learnings from his experience. In 2006, while I was visiting him at his startup company, Abrevity, he said, “You can’t justify a new product based on a cost analysis of the first-generation product. You have to have a vision.”

Joel and I had experienced the frustration of trying to create new products at a company that was in a high-volume, low-margin business — hard disk drives. On the one hand, Joel had prototyped a product that could have been the first available Ethernet-interfaced free-standing disk storage unit. I had been involved with defining a disk drive that stores and plays back video streams without a computer attached. While our company had funded the early prototyping of these products, it did not make the investment needed to launch them as consumer or end-user products.

Joel’s explanation, as I understand it, is that the company did an analysis of the cost of the first products in each case and concluded that the product cost too much to be priced reasonably in the marketplace. Now here’s where “vision” comes in. When you’re introducing a radical new product, you have to price it not based on the initial product’s cost, but based on a combination of the needs of the market and the expected cost curve as volume increases.

Companies selling services, such as cell phone service, do this all the time. To make the service workable, they have to invest a large amount of capital in infrastructure, such as cell phone towers, switching equipment, and so on. But pricing of the phone service must chosen both to make it attractive to the consumer and, when the number of subscribers reaches a reasonable target, to make a reasonable return on the investment.

The same thing is true with new products. The barrier to radical innovation and new product introduction in companies that have been operating in a low-margin high-volume environment for years is primarily a failure of imagination. They need the vision to see that (a) there is a market to be created or captured, (b) the product they have conceived is viable, and (c) initial pricing will lead to losses during the early stages of market development. Venture capital is based on selecting and funding this sort of innovation. But old companies have trouble thinking outside the low-margin, pay-for-itself-or-die product box.

That’s what Joel was telling me. If we could have planned the new businesses beyond the first product, and had got a commitment to fund the initial losses, we could have made history in disk drive marketing.

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Shifting the focus to longer term

January 26, 2008

Startup organizations are typically unsustainable and barely stable, because:

1. The pressures to develop and market a first product require taking some expedient shortcuts, such as hiring the most capable, but not necessarily the most team-oriented individuals; placing all priority on getting a workable product out the door, rather than building the product for maintainability and growth; putting in the most features rather than the best-tested features.

2. The top management habitually focuses on the race between funds running out and product delivery, rather than on internal communications, employee satisfaction (except with the potential value of their options), and leadership style. The command-and-control management style is workable for the first few years, but typically fails to inspire the organization to build itself into a self-renewing structure.

3. Having a focus on delivering a product using already-developed technology, the company does not need to invest in longer-term development of underlying technologies, or in the people who will bring in a steady stream of new technology.

The short-term focus of a startup must change soon after the deliver of the first few products. Companies that fail to incorporate longer-term thinking around their third year find themselves living from crisis to crisis. This makes the company unattractive to good managers and good technologists who don’t necessarily get their jolllies from living in a startup environment, where “startup” means short-term thinking.

What sort of changes does your organization need, now that the product has been delivered? A new CEO who actually allows the organization to function as if there were competence at all levels? A seasoned technology executive who knows what to do to make the organization attractive to innovative people? A shift in emphasis to listening to customer feedback and involving existing customers in product decisions? Addition of a Quality department that actually has the teeth to delay a product introduction?

Whatever the changes needed, don’t be surprised by the shift. Two reactions to the shift are typical:
(1) “What happened to my adrenaline rush?” — the people who need crises to keep up their energy should pursue another startup.
(2) “I didn’t know that a company could actually plan and execute with the future (beyond 1 month) in mind!” — the people who are stressed by the company’s failure to plan and execute for the long term grow into steady, reliable contributors.

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , ,