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Content Tagged with User:jerryk + business

From the Register…

I haven’t set foot there in years, and won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of what it takes to peddle Visual Studio these days, but I have to wonder…

What revenue or strategic business turf was obtained or protected with the useless, passive aggressive twaddle that pervades the mail threads linked to from the article? Is this stuff for real? Or is this just what Program Managers do these days to keep their cross group visibility sufficiently fluffed that at review time they can claw their way from level 63 to level 64 or some other similarly meaningless increment?

In this article, Joel Spolsky hits on something that’s always bothered me about the term “ISV” as well as something that has come to bother me over the last couple of years: What does the “I” mean?

Well, it means “independent,” of course… But independent of what? Implicitly it means indepdendent of whichever large, dominant vendor of hardware or software believes itself (perhaps with ample justification) to be the center of the universe, market-wise.

Who is that today? One could argue that the probable inventor of the term is becoming less the center with each passing year that it profitably sells nothing more than the next, at best modestly interesting, version of the same stuff it’s been pushing since 1990 (or the unfulfilled promise to deliver same some time soon). One might wonder whether the appearance of credible, open source and other alternatives to their increasingly commoditized core products is draining off the center of mass they represented in the market. One might speculate that one or more new centers of mass are accreting as we watch. You could even conjecture that things are moving toward a more diffuse, nebulous state, without the dense concentrations of money, influence and market share that have defined the software industry over the last decade.

It seems reasonable to suspect that software as an industry that exists for the sake of selling software itself is in decline, to be gradually succeeded by something else. For these pending something elses, software and computing may actually be the lifeblood of these companies’ operations, or even the core of any innovative contributions they might make, but the value reaped by their users may not come from buying software and installing it somewhere, or even from using things that look like what we’ve historically thought of when hearing the word “apps.”

Then again, 2010, may look just like 1994. But I doubt it.