Secrets Of Software Success
By Harward Business School Press
Software Industry is one of the most powerful wealth creators in the history. In this book “Secrets Of Software Success” by Harward Business School Press, based on the survey of more than 100 global software companies, the first panoramic view of the conditions that influence results for both the product and service sides of the sofware industry is presented. The book starts with various software inventions like first patent of clockmaker in 1769, electronic spreadsheet VisiCalc in 1978, Boeing 777 in 1995 (software with wings!), health software like mapping of genetic code in 1990 to gene based medicine in 1997, controlling nuclear plants etc and how these knowledge based businesses created today’s wealth and jobs.While the potential of creating wealth and prosperity in the software industry seems boundless, very few remain or even become successfull over time, the author examines various factors like key management strategy, right product at the right time, development processes, tackling of leadership challenges and how the marketing GODS make the software kings. The book goes back to early days in 1949, when Europe and US government gave decisive push to software industry and how globalization took place, the flourishing growth in India and China and how some of the players like IBM,SAP, BAAN, Oracle and Microsoft shaped the software industry. In the Chapter on Winning the war on Software Talent, author describes scarcity of software professionals as the major key challenge of software leaders and various methods to recruit software talent. The book tells about how and why software projects usually fail, the importance of software development methodology and processes and how it helps the quality and productivity.
The chapter on Marketing Gods describes how software product companies build market leadership and how they sustain it once it is achieved and what marketing strategies attackers use to break the market leadership of an established players. The importance of partnering, the nurturing and training your business partners and case study of how it allowed Java to grow quickly and exponentially is described in detail and how the delicate balance between competition and cooperation is achieved in the partner webs.In the landscape of the future author talks about several reasons of U.S.dominance in the software area, the future of fully digitized and one stop solution practices, Componentization and Servicization of products and challenge to the software license based business model.
