Has the software industry forgotten the art of writing and packaging enterprise solutions? Vista. SAP SOA. 5+ year initiatives. And still works in progress. Oracle and IBM mostly buying other software companies rather than building new product. With the promise that the M&A binge will bring shared service economies in various SG&A areas. Yet SG&A is still 5 to 10 times investments in new product development.
While those are trends which should bother every CIO, goodness is gradually happening in the form of vertical disintegration of the industry, similar to the "fabless" trend around chips over the last decade.
A slow but steady stream of software coding, testing and release management is being outsourced by software vendors. Some of the outsourcers now deliver multiple product releases a month, but the industry does not publicly acknowledge much of their role. Similarly, communities such as around open source software and others like the SAP Developer Network (SDN) are sprouting up to provide alternative support and talent channels. Finally, third party maintenance providers are showing up around many packaged software products.
So, we would end up vendors which design solutions. Others which code and test them. Still others which market and sell them. Creative, efficient specialists. Works in so many other industries. I think software is ready to also head that way.
