• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

D. Murali

If you've been waiting for a history of the software industry, this is the book for you. And there's more too - on how to survive the information age at work

A HISTORY of the software industry is what Martin Campbell-Kelly offers in his book titled From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, from The MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu). The chronicle can't be one-dimensional, so the author uses three vectors to explain. First is `time' to discuss historical development and `periodisation of the industry', from `the first glimmerings in the mid 1950s.'

Second is `sectorisation', which breaks the industry into three components: "software contractors, producers of corporate software products, and makers of mass-market software products." Microsoft "gets a rightful and prominent place" in the mass-market discussion, as "a corrective to the common misconception that Microsoft is the centre of the software universe around which all else revolves."

The third vector is of products and services, because "software comes in many prices, sizes, and genres."

The author points out that it is not possible to find out the total revenues of the industry from any public-domain source. For example, "The figure given by Software Magazine - a well-regarded proxy for industry size - speaks only for the biggest firms." Another problem in measurement is that in the software industry, as in the `chemical industry', "products are sometimes consumed within the industry." Kelly suspects this to cause `double-counting' of total sales; therefore, he suggests considering only sales to end-users as a measure of industry revenues. One wonders if a VAT for software may perhaps yield the numbers with greater accuracy.

A difficulty for historians of the industry is the lack of archived company material, such as "annual reports, minutes of board meetings, planning documents, product literature, and so on."

Kelly writes that SDC (Systems Development Corporation) is "the only major corporate archive available," covering the years 1956 to 1981.Companies usually think of creating an archive "on the occasion of commissioning a history for a 25th or a 50th anniversary." But "few software firms have reached this stage of maturity," observes the author.

Kelly is remorseful that library shelves groan with the weight of "reports of government-funded research inquiries", few of which relate to software. But there's an exception that the book discusses: The 1985 report of the UK's Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development (ACARD) titled, Software: A vital key to UK competitiveness. That was when "Bill Gates was making his second billion," but the inquiry ignored the PC. The report opened with a grand definition of `software engineering' as "the application of sound, scientific, mathematical, management, and engineering principles to the production of programs, within estimated costs and at a competitive level of performance and price."

The committee gave 15-pages of recommendations; "tedious reading, even for an enthusiast," comments Kelly.

Within five years of the report, "nine of the 10 leading British software companies examined by the ACARD committee had been acquired by overseas interests or gone bankrupt." If that's tragic, there's more: "Nothing in the report, even had it been implemented, would have had the slightest bearing on that outcome."

A good book to travel back in time with.

Virtues of batching

RON Hopkins tells you How to Survive the Information Age at Work, and to achieve `peak performance amid never-ending change' in a new book from Jaico (www.jaicobooks.com) . To the information-overloaded, there's a straight tip in the introduction, that what you need is "just enough information to give yourself the solution you need, quickly." The trick, as Hopkins, puts is "to spot what is true information and what is `noise'".

The not-so-nice thing about noise is that though it looks like information, it keeps you "distracted, overworked, overwrought, and so busy." Not something new, as you'd know in chapter 1 where the author discusses Claude Shannon's 1949 work, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" that was of great importance to military intelligence.

Another chapter is on `working smart' where you come across distressing statistics. OECD found in the 1990s that European office workers generated 3.5 billion sheets of paper, and pored over 800 million sheets of computer printout every day. A study in the UK found that 7.3 per cent of the salary bill of senior managers and directors was "lost through executives searching for documentation on paper-strewn desks."

The US is no different: "Executives spend an average of six weeks a year looking for documents." That can perhaps account for missed vacations. Add to that loss the cost of stress arising from missing papers. "There isn't a word in the English business vocabulary that adequately describes this phenomenon of `being busy' without useful productivity," notes Hopkins to spur up lingo chasers.

A practical technique you can try today is to use `speak to' file, "where you can drop the occasional note or document", rather than communicating on a regular basis. When connecting with a person, you type a key word to retrieve all the items for discussion. "You will accomplish more with less effort by `batching' where you can," advises Hopkins. He says this way "better mirrors our own mental `filing' systems and certainly matches our need to feel we are creating order."

The sonic indicator of incoming mail is better switched off, counsels the book. "One large UK insurer once had a rule that all e-mails should be responded to within 15 minutes." The assumption was that every mail was as urgent and vital to the recipient as to the sender, and that everybody was always at the desk, not minding interruptions to their tasks. Soon, the rule had to give way to the rule of `natural flow', continues Hopkins. Reason: "People like to complete what they're doing and business can't trade on half-done services and products." Therefore, with e-mails too, adopt `batching', and handle them "at set times of the day, preferably when you handle all traffic."

Useful, if you are eager to survive.

Tailpiece

"The Supreme Court is seized of the menace of unsolicited calls on mobiles!"

"Good, I wish there were a public interest litigation on spam too."

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Call of the handset

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line