Strategic Monoliths and Microservices: Preface
Vernon and Jaskula outline how this book can help with system transformation and who this book is designed to help.
From the book
From the book
From the book
Chances are good that your organization doesn't make money by selling software in the "traditional sense," and perhaps it never will. That doesn't mean that software can't play a significant role in making money for your organization. Software is at the heart of the wealthiest companies.
Take, for example, the companies represented by the acronym FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now held by Alphabet). Few of those companies sell any software at all, or at least they do not count on software sales to generate the greater part of their revenues.
Approximately 98% of Facebook's money is made by selling ads to companies that want access to the members of its social networking site. The ad space has such high value because Facebook's platform provides for enormous engagement between members. Certain members care about what is happening with other members and overall trends, and that keeps them engaged with people, situations, and the social platform. Capturing the attention of Facebook members is worth a lot of money to advertisers.
Apple is for the most part a hardware company, selling smartphones, tablets, wearables, and computers. Software brings out the value of said smartphones and other devices.
Amazon uses a multipronged approach to revenue generation, selling goods as an online retailer; selling subscriptions to unlimited e-books, audio, music, and other services; and selling cloud computing infrastructure as a service.
Netflix earns its revenues by selling multilevel subscriptions to movie and other video streaming services. The company still earns money through DVD subscriptions, but this part of the business has—as expected—fallen off sharply with the rising popularity of on-demand streaming. The video streaming is enhanced for, and controlled by, the experience with user-facing software that runs on TVs and mobile devices. Yet, the real heavy lifting is done by the cloud-based system that serves the videos from Amazon's AWS. These services provide video encoding in more than 50 different formats, serving up content through content delivery networks (CDN) and dealing with chaotic failures in the face of cloud and network outages.
Google also makes its money through ad sales; these ads are served along with query results from its search engine software. In 2020, Google earned approximately $4 billion from direct software usage, such as via Google Workspace. But the Google Workspace software does not have to be installed on user computers, because it is provided in the cloud using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. According to recent reports, Google owns nearly 60% of the online office suite market, surpassing even the share claimed by Microsoft.
As you can see from these industry leaders' experiences, your organization doesn't need to sell software to earn market-leading revenues. It will, however, need to use software to excel in business both now and over the years to follow.
What is more, to innovate using software, an organization must recognize that a contingent of software architects and engineers—the best—matter. They matter so much that the demand for the best makes them ridiculously difficult to hire. Think of the significance of landing any one of the top 20 picks in the WNBA or NFL draft. Of course, this description does not apply to every software developer. Many or even most are content to "punch a clock," pay their mortgage, and watch as much of the WNBA and NFL on TV as they possibly can. If those are the prospects you want to recruit, we strongly suggest that you stop reading this book right now. Conversely, if that's where you've been but now you want to make a meaningful change, read on.
For those organizations seeking to excel and accelerate their pace of innovation, it's important to realize that software development achievers are more than just "valuable." If a business is to innovate by means of software to the extent of ruling its industry, it must recognize that software architects and engineers of that ilk are "The New Kingmakers," a term coined by Stephen O'Grady in his 2013 book The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World [New-Kingmakers]. To truly succeed with software, all businesses with audacious goals must understand what drives this ilk of developer to transcend common software creation. The kinds of software that they yearn to create are in no way ordinary or obvious. The most valuable software developers want to make the kind of software that determines the future of the industry, and that's the recruiting message your organization must sound to attract (1) the best and (2) those who care enough to become the best.