Software Ecosystem: Understanding an Indispensable Technology and Industry (Paperback)

Description:

Software has gone from obscurity to indispensability in less than fifty years. Although other industries have followed a similar trajectory, software and its supporting industry are different. In this book the authors explain, from a variety of perspectives, how software and the software industry are different--technologically, organizationally, and socially.

The growing importance of software requires professionals in all fields to deal with both its technical and social aspects; therefore, users and producers of software need a common vocabulary to discuss software issues. In Software Ecosystem, Messerschmitt and Szyperski address the overlapping and related perspectives of technologists and nontechnologists. After an introductory chapter on technology, the book is organized around six points of view: users, and what they need software to accomplish for them; software engineers and developers, who translate the user's needs into program code; managers, who must orchestrate the resources, material and human, to operate the software; industrialists, who organize companies to produce and distribute software; policy experts and lawyers, who must resolve conflicts inside and outside the industry without discouraging growth and innovation; and economists, who offer insights into how the software market works. Each chapter considers not only the issues most relevant to that perspective but also relates those issues to the other perspectives as well. Nontechnologists will appreciate the context in which technology is discussed; technical professionals will gain more understanding of the social issues that should be considered in order to make software more useful and successful.

David Messerschmitt is Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Clemens Szyperski is a Software Architect at Microsoft in Redmond and affiliated with Microsoft Research. He is a School of Computer Science Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Table of Contents:

Preface	xi
1	Introduction	1
1.1	What Makes Software Interesting?	2
1.2	Organization and Summary	7
1.3	Research and Discussion Issues	11
2	Information Technology	13
2.1	Information	14
2.2	The Constituents of IT	21
2.3	Moore's Law	26
2.4	Research and Discussion Issues	37
2.5	Further Reading	39
3	Users	41
3.1	Applications Present and Future	42
3.2	User Value	49
3.3	Research and Discussion Issues	63
3.4	Further Reading	65
4	Creating Software	67
4.1	Elements of Success	68
4.2	Organizing Software Creation	69
4.3	Software Architecture	84
4.4	Program Distribution and Execution	94
4.5	Distributed Software	106
4.6	Research and Discussion Issues	118
4.7	Further Reading	120
5	Management	121
5.1	Value Chains	122
5.2	Total Cost of Ownership	134
5.3	Social Issues in Software Management	135
5.4	Security as a Distributed Management Example	145
5.5	Research and Discussion Issues	166
5.6	Further Reading	169
6	Software Supply Industry	171
6.1	Industrial Organization and Software Architecture	171
6.2	Organization of the Software Value Chain	173
6.3	Business Relationships in the Software Value Chain	185
6.4	Research and Discussion Issues	196
6.5	Further Reading	197
7	Software Creation Industry	199
7.1	Industrial Organization of the Software Industry	199
7.2	Cooperation in the Software Industry	229
7.3	Component Software	244
7.4	Research and Discussion Issues	263
7.5	Further Reading	265
8	Government	267
8.1	Intellectual Property	267
8.2	Regulation	284
8.3	Research and Education	299
8.4	Research and Discussion Issues	306
8.5	Further Reading	308
9	Economics	309
9.1	Demand	310
9.2	Supply	323
9.3	Pricing	327
9.4	Rationale for Infrastructure	338
9.5	Software as an Economic Good	343
9.6	Research and Discussion Issues	347
9.7	Further Reading	349
10	The Future	351
10.1	Slowing Technological Advance	351
10.2	Information Appliances	353
10.3	Pervasive Computing	355
10.4	Mobile and Nomadic IT	357
10.5	Research and Discussion Issues	360
10.6	Further Reading	360
	Postscript	361
	Notes	365
	Glossary	375
	References	391
	About the Authors	403
	Name Index	405
	Subject Index	4