The (old) new software industry
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
Facebook is a hot mess most of the time, but I usually enjoy the “memories” that remind me what I posted on this date in past years. A couple of days ago, on April 30, I was reminded that in 2007 I attended the New Software Industry conference at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. These were the days when SaaS and other cloud platforms were emerging as a significant packaging concept, and companies were rethinking their delivery models as well as their split between product and services.
In reviewing those old posts, there were a lot of points that are still valid today, and topics ranged from development practices to software company organization to venture capital. The discussion about the spectrum of software development practices was especially on point: there are some things that lend themselves to a heavily-specified waterfall-like model (e.g., infrastructure development), while others that benefit from an agile approach (e.g., most applications). I also liked this bit that I picked up from one of the sessions about software industry qualifications:
In World of Warcraft you can tell if someone has a Master’s in Dragon Slaying, and how good they are at it, whereas the software industry in general, and the open source community in particular, has no equivalent (but should).
I finished my coverage by pointing out that this was a very Valley-centric view of the software industry, and that new software industry conferences in the future would need to much more exclusive of the global software industry.
I was already live-blogging at conferences by this point in time, and you can read all my posts for the conference here.
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