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Doc, you maniac
When the software industry is mature, it will look a lot like the construction industry. Misled by the language, man! The software industry might use the same words as construction, but it will never, ever look like it as a business. Here's why: Every building is a unique object. They may be mostly put together from lots of the same basic components, but they are all discrete, unique objects. You can't build one high-rise and then copy it off 200 million times. You have to build each one separately. Software, on the other hand, is a "build-once, sell often" business. The process of building one piece of software is similar to building one house, but when you're done building it once, you can go out and sell it to everybody, without ever having to build it again. This is why a Microsoft can exist in software and not in construction. No construction company, no matter how big, can specialize in everything and take on every construction contract at once. Microsoft, on the other hand, can build one of each kind of software and then sell it to everyone. In construction terms, it's like if a company could build "House 2000" and "Skyscraper 6.0" and sell identical copies off instantly to anyone who needed a house or a skyscraper. If you want a real-world analogy, try the cola industry. Coca-Cola comes up with a formula for Coke, and one for Diet Coke, and one for Sprite, and so on. Then they license the formula and some branding symbols to bottlers all over the world, who create trillions of cans of the exact same thing, and sell them to everyone. One product for each "application", and each copy of the product is identical. The only difference is the "bottling" process for software is so cheap that MS doesn't even need to license someone else to do it. There are responses to this message:
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