Ken Uchikura Newsletter Vol. 206 Software Development
Nov
9
Software Development
Independent and small software development companies like ours cannot compete in the same market as large companies like Google and Microsoft. No company or organization would hire a small software company to work on a huge project. The same goes for when you’re hiring someone to build a tower building. You wouldn’t hire a small carpenter for that big of a job. And it’s because they don’t have the same kind of resources (people, goods, money, etc.) other than their technology and experience. So, how can small software development companies survive?
I believe they can survive by finding a niche market to target. In English, the word, “niche”, refers to “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service”. The strength of a small software development company is that it can frequently work on small projects that don’t require the massive resources a large company has to build up its business.
When you’re doing business in a niche market, you don’t have to be the first one to capture market trends. What is important is understanding what problems customers currently encounter. From there, it’s your job to provide solutions to those problems quickly and at a low cost. Therefore, our products don’t reflect the world’s latest technology. Rather, they’re practical application developments like automating mundane tasks.
Also, to reduce costs and deliver a good product, the development cycle needs to be as short as possible. Needless to say, the largest cost of software development is labor. To shorten the development cycle, products need to be broken down into smaller components. Developing the same function every time you needed it to work would be a waste of time. So, designing a reusable function that people can share and use interchangeably will lead to cost savings.
In software, we use the word, “drawer”, to describe the resources we have. So, the number of function libraries (or drawers) you have in software development is important. If your tasks are time-consuming, why not consider software development? After developing the software, there’s no longer any additional cost, no matter how many times you use it. Today, we call this digital transformation.
Kenichi Uchikura
President / CEO
Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.
ken.uchikura＠pspinc.com
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