May 08
I started my professional programming career over 20 years ago on the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga was a state-of-the-art personal computer, with a proprietary operating system, windowed GUI, and dedicated sound and graphics chips when the IBM PC was still saying, “C:DOS RUN.”
The Amiga computer was fast for its time, but maddeningly slow in hindsight: 5-10 minutes to compile a typical development project. Hard drives were still external, bulky and expensive at $500 for 30MB. The Amiga system APIs were plentiful, massive and complex, like the Win32 APIs that followed. I wrote software in C, using a programmable text editor and the “Make” tool to build projects.
A lot has changed in two decades. As with most things in this business, software development tools and systems are now better, faster, and sometimes cheaper. But what are the most important changes?
In the spirit of David Letterman, following are my “Top 10 Advances in Software Development.” These are the things–from my perspective, in increasing order of importance–that have most improved software development and entrepreneurship over the past 20 years. I encourage you to reply with your own Top 10 list.
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Tags: Business, Development, Software
May 03
During my 25 years as a software entrepreneur, I’ve had the pleasure and challenge of selling PC software to three major markets: large enterprises, general consumers, and software developers.
Of course, each target market has its own advantages and disadvantages, which I summarize below. Note this list is from the perspective of a small software company (2-50 employees) with limited funds. Microsoft and Google may hold a different view.
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Tags: Business, Marketing, Sales, Software
May 01
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday loosened a legal test that many feel has resulted in a boom of obvious patents that have threatened the software industry.
Federal law states that a patent cannot be granted for an invention that a person of “ordinary skill” in the same field could have created. But since many things become obvious in hindsight, in 1982 the Federal Court of Appeals added a legal test stating that “teaching, suggestion or motivation” must also exist that could lead an ordinary person to develop the invention. This requires prior written documentation that is often difficult or impossible to find, and as a result, no obviousness case has ever been brought before the Supreme Court.
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Tags: Patents, Software
