Who decides?

Reading Ballmer's brave "New World of Work" made me think about who it is that decides what software is going to be like in the future? What is the process, both the implicit and the explicit one? Because software is a business and companies produce software products, one would think it should be the market forces that decides. However market forces deals with supply and demand, and I am not so sure that works the same way for software as it does for other product types. First, the production cost for software lies almost completely in the development of the software, as the production and disstribution costs are virtually nil. Second, the demand side is hard to define. For software the demand should be users telling the software industry what they want and then the industry develops it (if there is a business case), but most of the time the users don't know what they want! So what happens? Well, as we can read from Mr. Ballmer's opinion specifically and Microsoft in general is, that we decide what the furture is and what products we are going to develop and sell to you. And if you don't like it go somewhere else...WHAT there is nowhere else to go...though!!

Whats next?

Having worked with computers and developed software in various capacities, I have found lots of fascinating things and lots of frustrations. I am sure others in a similar position have done the same. Over time, I have spend a lot of time thinking about what can be done to make it better - again, I am sure I am not the only one. I have found that one thing is thinking about it and another completely different thing is actually doing something. I guess the doing part has two components to it: what to do and having the time to do it in. This blog is meant to be a way for me to deal with the first part - what to do. All the things and ideas that I have in my head are all very well, but completely pointless if they don't get put to any use. I have found that when I get an idea to solve something, I eventually get stuck and start thinking in circles - does anyone else experience this? I hope that this blog can help with this, by freeing up some space in my brain, so I can think further than what I normally could.