Concepts of product software
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Concepts of product software Lai Xu1 and Sjaak Brinkkemper2 1
CSIRO ICT Centre, Hobart, Australia; 2Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands Correspondence: Sjaak Brinkkemper, Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80.089, Utrecht 3508 TB, The Netherlands. Tel: þ 31 (30) 253 3175; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Both the impact of software on life and our dependence on software is rapidly increasing. Using product software is an everyday phenomenon and product software is a major worldwide industry. Yet, there are very few scientific studies reported on the engineering of product software specifically. In this paper, we discuss specifics of the software business, the various terms used for product software and provide our definition of product software. Moreover, we explain difference between product software and tailor-made software from a software development perspective and provide a new framework for the categorization of product software. This paper points out the urgent need for more research on product software and the directions. European Journal of Information Systems (2007) 16, 531–541. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000703 Keywords: product software; tailor-made software; commercial software; open-source software
Introduction
Received: 31 March 2006 Revised: 10 May 2007 Accepted: 9 August 2007
In the early days of computing, any software that was not provided with a computer had to be custom-built. This was the era where information systems were designed and developed according to the specific wishes of the customer. The first product software came about as a result of an agreement reached between IBM and the United States Department of Justice in the later 1960s to unbundle the software from hardware (Carmel, 1997). In the 1980s, a new class of independent software vendors started to pre-build integrated software designed to fulfil a whole range of business functions, and these offerings became known as packaged software. This resulted in the creation of thousands of product software companies, of which Microsoft, SAP, Borland, and Oracle are examples of the ones that made it into large multi-nationals with billions of revenues. Product software accounts for substantial economic activity all over the world (OECD, 2001, 2002). In 2001 (1999), the total market of the product software industry was estimated to be 196 (154.9) billion USD, which is just 9% of the overall ICT spending of 2.1 trillion USD worldwide. ‘The product software sector is among the most rapidly growing sectors in OECD countries, with strong increases in added value, employment and R&D investments’ (OECD, 2002). Although this percentage of product software usage differs between countries, the trend in many organizations is that the make-or-buy decision falls more and more in favour of the purchasing of standard product software. Software is present in a multitude of products, in social, business and domestic human–machine interactive system
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