A Reuters article today is only the latest in a series of articles and pronouncements regarding "the future of the Software Industry". Since my company sells commercial software I've had to think a lot about this. My take for the next five years is:
* overall IT industry revenue will remain flat
* software licensing revenue will fall dramatically due to competitive pricing pressure and commoditization by open source software
* more money will be spent on custom development and integration
* web-based software rental (e.g. ASPs) will see more use, as the cost justifications win out over the concerns about access and ownership.
The software industry is definitely maturing, much like the auto industry matured in the middle of the 20th century. There'll still be a room for new companies to come to market with a product that saves a company money or time, but few companies will be trying to sell something dramatically new. Even "web services", at its root, is little different than CORBA next-gen, and the "grid computing" hype is another swing in the client-server paradigm pendulum.
Given all this I'm very optimistic for my own company, though there's few other software companies I'd invest in.
Posted by brianb at May 5, 2003 09:02 AM | TrackBack |
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