Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Leveraging Industry Shifts

But why all these new rules about how to leverage technology? And why now? The short answer is this: Changes in the way users access software are driving changes in the way companies develop software. In the dawn of computing, a tremendously expensive computer the size of an auditorium could barely add two numbers. A small cohort of students and scientists had access to operate or develop software. In 1961, my father would wake up at 2 a.m. just to run simple arithmetic operations on his university's supercomputer. Two decades later, the personal computer (PC) was a big leap in terms of accessibility, yet most software was still written from scratch at great expense. This is why developing computer software has remained the domain of specialists until recently. Over the past few years, the cost of developing software has dropped by as much as an order of magnitude (10x): An application that would have cost $2 million to build a few years ago might cost $200,000 to build today. A critical part of these reduced costs are interrelated forces that make software easier to access and cheaper to develop.

One key driver is the availability of interchangeable software “parts.” During the Industrial Revolution 1.0, the availability of interchangeable parts drove down the cost of manufacturing and led to increasing specialization and diversity. For example, whereas pre-Industrial Revolution rifle makers would go out and chop their own timber, mill their own stocks, ...