Lessons for today
This blog is about history, and the parts I’m most interested in may not be the ones with the most immediate consequences. But here’s a list of some things I see from a historical perspective that can maybe provide insight for at least some people looking at today’s industry landscape.
- On-premises and time-shared software used to be highly synergistic. There’s no good reason they won’t be again (although multi-enterprise bottlenecks may have crept into the real-time architectures that didn’t arise in the batch and partly-batch cases. Which reminds me …
- A big part of the history of software development is clearing bottlenecks: Find one; clear it. Find the next; clear it. That’s a big part of the reason product evolution is so seemingly slow and incremental. Modularizing is a big part of the bottleneck-clearing process, but not actually a replacement.
- Similarly, a big part of the history of artificial intelligence — and of software that has anything to do with text — can be described as “Start with a bad system; keep improving it.”
- Oracle always had a NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome about system software. Although there are increasingly many exceptions, that still seems relatively true as compared with other system software vendors. However, Oracle never had an NIH syndrome about applications.
- Microsoft people used to be utterly driven. If it’s not that way any more – and I get the impression it isn’t — this is a big change.
- There always are important conferences. Their identities just change. Mid-level marketing people take over the previously good ones, and newer more exclusive ones emerge in large sectors. In particular, new industry sectors commonly have great trade shows, conferences, and other gatherings. (Example: 2005’s inaugural Text Mining Summit.) A huge part of what I learned about the software industry was at conferences, and occasionally one is still very worthwhile.
- The software industry is quick to use some technologies, slow to adopt others. Tracking which is which can be good guide in predicting which will eventually succeed.
I hope to address some or all of these subjects more substantively as time permits. Please stay tuned.
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30 years of software stories
I’ve long wanted to document the history of the software industry – and related parts of the technology world — for two major sets of reasons.
First, it’s simply an amazing industry – one of the great entrepreneurial successes of all time. From its start in the early 1960s, the computer software and services industry fought off a series off virulent attacks from much stronger and more powerful groups – the computer hardware industry, the aerospace industry (the first big timesharers), the banks, and the accountants. Products were innovated right and left; so were sales and marketing strategies. (And so, alas, also were financial accounting shenanigans.) With limited exceptions, this wonderful slice of business history is not well documented at all. And all instruction aside — I have experienced or otherwise picked up a lot of great stories in my 24 years of involvement in the technology industry, and just want to share some of them.
Second, a lot of the industry’s history is recent enough to provide significant perspective on our present and future. Software is central to how businesses and other enterprises (including governments) operate. It’s increasingly central to how we live at home. Software is important, and how it has been sold and used in the recent past is in many cases a good guide to how it will affect our lives in the near future. And since I’m a software industry consultant and analyst, professionally interested in which strategies and companies will succeed and fail, I have an especial interest in extracting whatever lessons I can from what has gone before.
I’ve been lucky enough to watch this industry from an early stage. The first time I visited Oracle it had fewer than 50 employees. The same is true of Lotus. I’ve consulted at the CEO level to a lot of the industry’s most interesting or biggest companies, and at lower levels to some of the rest. I’ve had spirited, multi-hour talks with many of the industry’s luminaries (some were even sober at the time). I’ve been a newsbreaker and a newsmaker. Along the way I even picked up considerable insight into the industry’s doings well before I got involved (which was in 1981). And I don’t want all these memories to be lost.
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About the author
I’m having trouble with static pages in WordPress right now, so I’ll just do the “About” pages for the blog inline as posts.
About the author
In the early and mid-1980s, Curt Monash was a top-ranked stock analyst covering software/computer services. “software and data services” in the early and mid-1980s. Since then, he has always been around the news of software and related industries — reporting it, analyzing it, predicting it, and sometimes even making it. Entrepreneurs and other luminaries with whom he’s been privileged to have instructive private conversations include Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Ross Perot, Mitch Kapor, Dan Fylstra, Ann Winblad, Mitchell Kertzman, John Doerr, Bill Janeway, Dave Duffield, John Imlay, John Maguire, John Cullinane, Rick Crandall, Marty Goetz, Steve Case, John Landry, Esther Dyson and many, many others. Fuller biographical information about Curt can be found on the “About” page for the Monash Report and at Curt’s Monash Information Services bio page; software industry leaders’ views of Curt may be seen on the Monash Information Services testimonials page. (Note: The Monash Information Services site hasn’t been updated for a while, and accordingly needs a bit of freshening.)
Curt’s views, including some historical observations, may also be found in the Monash Report (analysis of software and related industries), Text Technologies (covering text mining, search, speech recognition, text command-and-control, and other linguistics-related software sectors), and DBMS2 (covering developments in enterprise database management and XML-based SOAs).
Curt’s primary email address follows the template FirstnameLastname@Lastname.com , although disguising it that way is tantamount to closing the pantry door after the spam has already gotten in. Thus, please put a distinctive title on your email, so that your email won’t mistakenly be thrown out with the bad stuff. Mentioning “Software Memories Blog” would be one excellent idea.
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About this blog
I’m having trouble with static pages in WordPress right now, so I’ll just do the “About” pages for the blog inline as posts.
About this blog
This blog is about the history of the software industry — its products, its people, its users, its companies, its triumphs, its failures, and everything else. That’s a huge subject, of course, so I’ll only be able to get to the barest fraction of it. Realistically, I suspect that many of the posts here will grow out of current-day issues I’m thinking about; indeed, I may blog elsewhere about present/future stuff, then add a link to a second historical note that I put here.
For more about what I intend to do with this blog, please see the post “30 years of software stories” right after this one.
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