Software Industry

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Introduction

Software industry encompasses all the activities and businesses involved with development, maintenance and distribution of computer software. Software industry started its operation during mid-70’s. In this modern era of technology, software industry can be regarded as the most booming industry in the world. Software industry also covers the activities like software servicing, training and consultancy.

The software industry is the largest and most booming industry in the world. For the last couple of years this industry is dominated by the software industry giant Microsoft corporation. One of the report of Microsoft software magazine shows that in 2005, the total amount of revenues earned by software companies were highest.

Software industry primarily concerned with the development of two types of software. One is proprietary software, which are owned by a single organization or individual and the other is open source software, which are written to use, distribute, recode and decode free of cost. The software industry business are principally based on proprietary software. Proprietary software needs to deal with the activities of licensing and security and these require lots of money to invest, whereas earning through open source software comes specifically from selling of services, or through training activities.

Present tendencies of software industry

The economy of the leading companies are mostly dependent on the development of proprietary software products. Although some major companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems are also taking part in developing open source software to take the advantage of getting some portion of market share.

Some aspects of software industry

Packaged applications: Made for business purposes and are written for mass distribution
Enterprise software: This type of software is basically made for big corporations for their production or selling purposes.
Systems software: Specifically made for system(computer) related functions, like Operation system software.Some other categories are utility software, application software, etc.

Software industry revenue and growth

The U.S. is estimated to control more or less 50% share of the world software market and the U.S. software companies are the leading companies in the world in respect of development and production of softwares. The packaged software market in U.S. is estimated about $70 billion.

One survey report by US Census Bureau reveals the fact that System software publishing earned total revenues of $31,497 $31,459 $31,842 for the year 2003, 2002 and 2001 respectively. The application software publishing earned a total of $38,492 $37,473 $37,297 for the year 2003, 2002, and 2001 respectively.

To know more about software industry one can browse the following link:

  • Software Industry Analysis

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