A new concept: Throwaway Software.

More and more, people are learning new software as they go. A few will stick to one software for a long time simply because it is easier, but changing is easy too, especially if the new system is easy to use.

But how do you produce throwaway software? And is it worth the trouble?

As we see things evolving, more and more, people want to use software anywhere they go. This means software that runs on the Internet in some ways. For instance, you can use Google Map anywhere you go, as long as you have a computer to access the Internet.

A computer? Oh! Yes! Cell phones such as an iPhone are small, but computers none the less. Last month, Sept 2008, we got 405 hits from different PDAs. It is, of course, pretty small (under 0.2% of our traffic,) but we are not targeting these systems at all. Actually, our site is probably difficult to look at from a PDA.

So… back to the throwaway software. The idea is actually like this: one person or a group creates a software, millions use it, someone else comes up with a better version, we throw away the first one. This works great with free software. For instance, you can use Google Map to show people different locations of your business franchises. One day, you may find out that Lambda company has a better mapping system that makes more sense to your business, you just switch to it. Voilà. This is how you get throwaway software.

This is very similar to what C/C++ programmers are used to. We use libraries to help us quickly achieve our development goals. Now, this is done at a higher level, where complete applications can be used to interact between each others to add tremendous functionality very quickly. Websites like facebook.com have APIs to interact with them. With these you can create modules that people can use freely or for a small fee. This adds functionality to your software or directly to the facebook.com interface. You may also end up with 100’s of duplicates, some good, some bad. That gives a choice to the consumer and it creates the throwaway software. As soon as a new version of a module is available, you may get millions of people using it within a few days.

This is quite interesting, because MS-Windows has tried again and again to have re-usable objects and that has partially failed. Now the Internet is taking it a step further, and somehow the re-usability is worked and moving forward really quickly.