Is commercial off-the-shelf software dying?
By Andrew Sacamano ~ June 6th, 2007. Filed under: From the Fringe.
A few days ago, I wrote about dividing software into two types: algorithmic and arbitrary. Algorithmic software does things that are elegant and logical. Arbitrary software does things based on business rules which were never meant to be algorithmic, or things like data mapping.
There will always be a market for people to write arbitrary software - businesses will invent new processes, more and more systems will need to exchange data, and so on. And while better tools become available every day, there is still the raw job of mapping data and specifying business rules, no matter how sophisticated the tools. But this market is the custom software market - these resulting software has no value to anyone else.
But for algorithmic software, the market is shrinking. Time and time again I’ve written code in-house that has been replaced, just a year or two later, by a much better open-source solution. Logging, monitoring, load balancing, testing frameworks, and dynamic HTML generation: probably several years of my professional life is now confined to the dark pit of forgotten in-house software.
Then there were the commercial web servers, application servers, and databases. Anybody still paying for Netscape/iPlanet Web Server? And while BEA WebLogic, or Oracle, seem securely part of the market for now, they have serious free competition: JBoss, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more. Microsoft has Linux, and OpenOffice, and Mozilla, and so on. Where would Apple be without their hardware design?
If more than a few companies do something, then the economics are in place for an open-source solution. And the economics of open-source are hard to fight when they come to your back yard. Unless you provide a service with your software, you face a double edged sword - the more people who might pay for your software, the more reason to create an open source alternative, and the better it will be.
So what do you think? Can an individual company survive the pressure, or will they fall one by one? Will the biggest fall first, leaving nothing but smaller niche players? Will they all go? Or is commercial software here to stay? Let me know.
July 8th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
As an interesting aside, I attended a talk by Richard Stallman about “Copyright vs. Community” (there is a summary on my site), where he addressed this issue from a different perspective. Fundametally, he agrees that off-the-shelf software is not the future, and he presented both technical and ethical arguments. In an ethical sense, moving away from off-the-shelf software is welcome.
How do we define the line between off-the-shelf software and a service? Does the iPod user interface count as a “service” to iPod users or as a software product? It is undoubtfully one of the selling points of the iPod. Furthermore, I doubt there will be a (successful) generic open-source music player platform in the near future, even though many companies write software for music players.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I don’t think that off the shelf commercial software is specifically dying, but it is undergoing a change, into what I don’t know. I think commercial software is here to stay but you are going to see some major changes with alot of the major players turning into more of the niche players.