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Concurrent Engineering Blog

How is Software Starting to Change the Products We Make

Posted by Emma Rudeck on 23-Jan-2015 09:50:00

softwar_starting_change_products_makeSoftware completely changes the way we interact with a product. It changes what that product can do. It changes the way that product can collect information about its usage, its diagnostics and its service needs.

In fact, Marc Andreesen, the original founder of Netscape, and now a venture capitalist wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal that said you might not know it, but you are a software company.

So you better figure out how to be a good software company. 

As the value continues to shift from hardware to software, your ability to differentiate and sustain your advantage is going to become embedded in software.

We're talking about is a shift from purely mechanically devices and systems to more sophisticated systems that integrate hardware and software together, to provide a rich user interface. This offers the ability to collect information and have parts that can be changed well after the fact, upgraded years later without having to remanufacture the product. 

There are products out there still that don't contain software. But, they're starting to become the exception rather than the rule and increasingly software is used to redefine the product. Think about how you can now customise high-end coffee machines:

  • How hot do you want the coffee?
  • How coarse do you want the grind?
  • How long should it wait to shut off after you don't interact with it?

All these settings that give you the ability to make that coffee maker work exactly as you want it to. Making coffee exactly as you want it to be.

Another example is modern windscreen wipers. What makes windscreen wipers innovative? Well there are automated controls, so that you don't have turn them on and turn them off when there's a little bit of water. Now they sense water. When they sense enough water, they wipe. When they sense a lot of water, they wipe fast with greater frequency. It's a smart system that runs itself.

There are versions of these smart systems are even smarter. For example, if you park your car and you leave the windows open while you run into the supermarket and it starts to rain, the car says "Oh, I better put the windows up, because I know it's raining, and I know this person wouldn't want rain inside their car." It's a great example of fairly dumb products becoming extremely smart in a relatively short period of time.

Once you have these smart products, which essentially have CPU's and software, somebody says "Why don't we just give them an IP address, and connect them to the Internet?" We’re not talking about the traditional Internet as we think of it with servers and laptops.

We’re talking about things on the Internet that aren't really computers in the way we traditionally think about them. Instead, we’d call them the coffee maker or the windscreen wipers. But these things are now connected to the Internet and they bring about the concept of the Internet of Things.

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