On the Non-physicality of Software

 

This is a relic from the times when software had a physical form, you could hold it in your hand.

In this new age, software comes streaming into your device, nobody touches anything, it has no physical form whatsoever.

The photo is a recent ad on eBay, for the Mac version of a product I wrote in 1985 which (humblebrag) just happened to turn out to be the first of a new class of software, called CRM, Customer Resource Management for people with a PC. Boring, I know, but at the time it was interesting to me.

There was one event that brought into sharp focus this concept that software has no physical form...

I was selling my product, the software I called TeleMagic, to a man in London. He was buying the right to sell my software in the UK. It was a very informal event. We sat at a table at a local café and crafted a handwritten agreement without lawyers involved. We signed, he gave me a check.

And then, for the true magic moment, I opened my briefcase and removed a stack of 10 "floppy diskettes" that contained the source code to the product, and copied them one by one onto the customer's hard drive.

Then I took the diskettes back. The customer had nothing physical at all. I went on to sell a few other countries on that trip, and it was just so delightful to get big checks for something that had no physical form.

Software is pure thought made real, just not real in the sense that you can sense its physicality.

The idea I had for the product was transferred from my brain through my fingertips onto the keyboard and into the computer. I used a specialized language called dBase II to get the computer to understand what I wanted it to do.

That first session of programming TeleMagic into existence was followed by thousands of others, addictively debugging, improving, inventing, throwing away long hours of work after rethinking, and overthinking, all these insane purely mental hours to create something that doesn't exist in any physical form.

Software is an entity that can take thousands of hours to create but can be eliminated in an instant with a simple Delete keystroke.

A product without a physical form has enormous advantages over all other products. It doesn't wear out or break down, it doesn't cost anything for transportation or storage, and it can be reproduced infinitely for almost zero incremental cost. It's this last one that is why software companies are so profitable.

In the pre-internet years, software needed a physical form so you could buy it and put it into your PC to make it do what you wanted. That's what the diskette was for: backup, storage, transportation.

That's all gone now. The software business is now even more profitable without all the mess of a physical product.

I keep having thoughts about getting back into the software business. It was fun...