From Software Business Community

Foundations of Software Business: Goals

Software is not only a large global business in its own right, but also a foundation for many other types of business including products (automobiles, cellphones, etc.) and services (banking, information dissemination, etc.). The scope of this book includes profit-making firms whose product or service surrounds software, or business units within larger firms which are strategically important to the firm and whose product or service surrounds software. The challenges and opportunities faced by such businesses and business units are qualitatively and quantitatively different from other vertical industries, since software as a target of design or production has many special or unusual characteristics. This book discusses the strategic challenges and opportunities for profit-making businesses or business units whose design and production surround software technology.

In addition, firms in the software industry not only form a dynamic marketplace with complementarity and competition, but they also engage in cooperative behavior that is essential to the smooth deployment of new technologies, and are affected by many policies promulgated by governments such as intellectual property, antitrust, and personal liberty and privacy. Firms in the industry are profoundly affected by these elements, and another goal of the book is to understand these industry level processes and their effect on individual firms.

Other related goals:

• Systematically cover all strategic issues encountered by a typical software business, with strong emphasis on issues that are special or specific to software businesses as distinct from other businesses.
• Draw on all relevant disciplines such as computer science, business and economics, management, the social sciences, and so forth, integrating and relating their perspectives and explaining their insights into strategic issues faced by software businesses.
• Do not view technology as a "black box", but explain the characteristics of software technology, and how it is designed and manufactured, that are germane to business issues.
• Empower the reader to understand not only the past and present, but also the future of the software business and industry.
• Draw upon the growing body of research literature pertaining to software business.
• Identify and list gaps in knowledge and open research issues, thereby informing researchers and students looking for thesis topics.

This book has characteristics distinctive from an encyclopedia, including:

• Top-down design and a conscious systematic coverage of software business and industry issues can be accomplished.
• Based on a wiki platform, the book can have many more authors than any traditional book. A diversity of authors can achieve more comprehensive coverage from a multidisciplinary perspective than would be feasible in a book with more limited authorship.
• Based on this modern wiki platform, this collaborative authorship can be accomplished more quickly and with less effort that through traditional methodologies.
• This book can be continuously updated based on new research results. Thus, it will be more stable and static than the encyclopedia, but more topical and modern than any traditional book.

The word "Foundations" in the title is intended to denote fundamental knowledge, founded primarily on research rather than on examples and cases, but using the latter to illustrate lasting issues and principles.