Software as a profession sucks, a rant.

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 10/23/2009 12:43 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> By the way, a whole book was written to some extent on why the 'rule'
> normally holds:
> 
> The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

I'll second the recommendation for that book.  My boss mentioned it so many
times that I finally went out and bought it.  I haven't read the sequel (The
Innovator's Solution), but I think I know what the gist of it is.

> It doesn't actually say that large companies don't innovate.  It
> suggests that they tend to only innovate in ways that are desired by
> their largest customers.  As a secondary effect, since the largest
> customers are often large companies which also
> do the same you end up with a decided lack of innovation in large
> companies. 

Another aspect of it was that big companies need a big market to achieve 5%
growth (or whatever their target is; the point is %5 for a big company is a
lot more than 5% for a small company), and so they're going to concentrate on
existing large markets.  The trick is that 'disruptive' technologies create
new markets that become large over time (as customers figure out new uses for
the tech), but may be tiny or non-existent during the technology's infancy.
Short-sighted companies (ie most companies) don't have the
leadership/foresight/courage to invest in things that have a very tiny market
(and unknown prospects for the future).  There's a fairly obvious cure for that...

Incidentally, going on my own political rant here, I believe that this leads
to one of the biggest value propositions for open-source software.  The key to
creating large markets is /customers/ figuring out ways to use your
technology.  But many proprietary system developers nowadays spend most of
their effort locking systems down so that they only do what the manufacturer
intended.  They are unwittingly limiting the market for their products.

By contrast, open-source software encourages the type of garage tinkering that
leads to innovative uses.  It's not impossible for proprietary software to
support innovation by customers.  You only need to look as far as the PC game
mod community.  Some of these mods are huge, completely changing the game.
Within that same industry you see the lock-down approach as well: the XBox360
requires digitally signed game data, and therefore doesn't support modding
(I'd be mad if I had the Xbox version of, say, Oblivion, and couldn't use any
of the great mods for that game).
</rant>

Matt