I was recently asked by a Chinese newspaper how China should view opportunities in the software market and if the market is saturated. And the legend - the elephant as spear, fan, rope etc - came to mind. We sometimes forget how big the software market is and how people tend to view it from their narrow vantage point.
Robert Scoble of Microsoft recently said the software market was about $ 40 billion large (he then corrected himself) - and much smaller than the advertising market (must paraphrase where Microsoft's revenue thoughts are). Microsoft itself is that big. IBM, Oracle and SAP add almost as much. Then there are countless other packaged software (ISV) companies.
Of course, then there are systems integrators, offshore vendors etc which write way more customization and other code each year than the ISVs do.
And there are internal IT software staff. And bloggers cutting and pasting small pieces of code. Embedded code in a growing number of devices. Software in countless games. Of course, each of these "blind" men thinks about software in his/her limited view.
And yet, there are so many verticals and geographies where way too much business process is still manual. So, I told the Chinese journalist there are still plenty of niches for its vendors to focus on. The software elephant can carry a number of players.
