Software is a Mature Industry

Here’s a great article that crystalizes some ideas I’ve been struggling with. More Evidence of a Maturing Software Industry talks about the slowing of the upgrade cycle for software like Microsoft Office. This is definitely a trend in mass market and some enterprise software, but there is still plenty of room for innovation in emerging niche markets. For example, the very idea of an RSS aggregator didn’t exist a few years ago, and it still hasn’t hit mainstream uptake, so there is plenty of growth ahead for that particular segment.

However, the nature of software development is becoming more of an assembly-line process, much of which can be outsourced to India. The “stripping down” of software development is leading to organizations whose core competency is software architecture and product management, not the actual coding. How long before even those processes are outsourced?

When you think about it, the only home office jobs necessary will be sales and marketing. Sales, because nothing will every replace the face-to-face meeting, and marketing, because a market’s culture is a critical element of marketing.

The reason I personally have been struggling with this is because I write software. I love software. It’s challenging, creative and fun. I’ve written a software platform used by some of our customers to manage their customer data. Until recently I viewed this as the strategic “secret sauce” for Escalan, the proprietary advantage we can leverage into a large company. But last year I had an epiphany: it’s not the software that is our advantage, it’s our expertise in how to use it to help companies make more money on the Internet. And that expertise is rooted in marketing. Thank God. So you won’t see much in the way of features and benefits about the software on our site (aside from the link above). Instead, we take a problem-oriented focus. We seek first to understand exactly how a company needs help with their marketing and only then do we consider whether our product is a fit for the problem at hand.

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