Peace be upon all of you …
How are you? hope all is fine 😀
Today we gonna illustrate how business looks at the software world and how software products seem from the point of view of market share.
At first we show the types of software and their differences. Then we go deeper with business interesting about software. And at last I give you some tips for software-related start-ups.
Types of software:
There are many different types of software. We can summarize it in three types. The three types are custom software, generic software and embedded software.
1. Custom software:
Custom software is some software which is developed to meet the needs of a particular customer and don’t concern about the others’ needs. For example websites and air-traffic control systems are custom software products.
2. Generic software:
Generic software, on the other hand, is designed to perform functions that many people need, and to run on general-purpose computers. Generic software is often called Commercial Off-The-Shelf software (COTS), and it is sometimes also called shrink-wrapped software since it is sometimes sold in packages wrapped in plastic. For example word processors, compilers, web browsers, operating systems and computer games are generic software products.
3. Embedded software:
The third type is embedded software. This type of software runs specific hardware devices or machines. Such devices include washing machines, radios, microwave ovens and mobiles etc.. . Unlike generic software, users cannot usually replace embedded software or upgrade it without also replacing the hardware.
At this spot, when we are able to differentiate among the three types of software, you are ready to see how business deals with each type of them. But before going deep in business world, I want to draws your attention to a remark. That remark says that “It is possible to take generic software and customize it. But we must be aware that when a new release of the generic software is issued, the customization work may have to be re-done. You can also take custom software and try to make it generic; however, this can be a complex process if the software was not designed in a flexible way.”
How different software types seem in market:
If you have software-related start-up, you should take care of two high important factors in the business world before you start your project; of course we assume that you categorized your project in one of the above illustrated types. The first is what’s the market share of each type of software, and that’s important not to launch your project and then don’t get the expected profit. And the second factor is what the development effort which is required during developing this project is, and that’s important for you because if the effort is great, and the product isn’t worthy, you are a big loser! You lose a lot of time and resources.
- About market share:
For custom type of software, it’s used by a few people and its success depends on meeting their needs. That doesn’t mean not to implement your start-up if it’s a customized one, but that means to do your best to introduce an extremely perfect product which meets all needs.
On the other hand, there is a tendency in the business world to attempt to use generic software instead of custom software because it can be cheaper and more reliable. But the main difficulty still that the generic type may not fully meet the organization’s specific needs. Generic software producers hope that they will sell many copies, but their success is at the mercy of market forces.
That means if your start-up is located here you have many competitors and supplements. So don’t raise its price and generalize its use as it possible and I promise you to get fine profit 🙂 .
The third type of software, embedded software, is the king of the market. Because of there are many devices are invented and developed every day, the demand on this type of software is increasingly grow. Every day we have new mobiles, cars, or microwave ovens types which require more embedded software systems.
So you are extremely lucky if your start-up is in this region. You can make high profit in short time if your idea is shiny and you implement & market it in an innovative way. This tutorial will help you so much in the innovation side of your product.
- About the development effort:
First of all let’s agree that developing some perfect software isn’t an easy matter! You must follow many rules which you can find in any software engineering reference. But developing a generic software product or an embedded one is almost quite harder than developing a custom one. In developing some custom software you have much more constraints and have many challenges to fully meet the need of the customer’s needs.
Hence at the end of this post we can say that business looks at the software world as the following figure shows:
By this we finished our post about the link between software and business. thank for reading 🙂
Moataz Mahmoud 
Very Good post 🙂
I have some comments to be added here:
– Studies states that in generic software, 20% of the features are used 80% of the time (See MS Word for example). Which implies that 80% of the generic features are not used frequently. And this leads us to the fact that the industry is moving toward building software that is customized for a special use (with flexibility to integrate with other modules). In other words, we can no longer build a generic software that meets all needs (it’s something from the past!).
More info: search about “Pareto principle”.
– Most of the software projects fails (in terms of meeting schedule and budget) due to bad effort estimation and management.
Best of Luck 🙂
Firstly : Thanks allot for this comment @Abd El-Rahman 🙂 .
Secondly : Let’s start from the second comment …
In the post I said that, from my point of view, the two main factor of the success of projects are the market share and the development effort. Do you see another factors?. I understand the second comment and I said something like your comment in the post 🙂
Thirdly: For The first comment … I think it’s depending on the type of the software product. You are all right in your example. But if you look at IE or any browser for example, you’ll find that the user uses more than 80% of its features. Let’s speak about Microsoft as an example. They moved towards customized products specially in Windows 8. You can use browser for sending mails, checking your social networks, or watching the forecast ,so they developed many apps for these purposes, but they can’t neglect developing IE 10 and IE 11. So if the trend is towards the customized products, it don’t eliminate the generic ones. That’s why when I spoke about the generic type I said “but their success is at the mercy of market forces”.
Finally: The source of these information is a software engineering book “I can send it for you 🙂 “. But of course I’ll search about Pareto principle :).