I'm still trying to arrange various themes in my head about the changing dynamics of software development and distribution and what it means for the future.
My sense is that there's a chunk of stuff going on, some of which runs in parallel with similar effects the web has had on other creation and distrubution models, some of it could be unique to software. And a host of things have yet to iron themselves out.
One of these aspects is curation or more broadly, deciding what's good and what's bad.
Curation used to be simple - it was called print marketing and went something like; build something, sell some and make a little profit, invest that profit in telling more people about your product and maybe making some more products; rinse repeat. In time the remit of your marketing mix would mature and expand to encompass shiny glass office buildings and other classic shop-front artefacts upon which someone could base a decision about whether your company and product were good or not.
And that was a generally fair and democratic way to provide a regulate curation in old world markets. If you built a shitty product, you wouldn't make enough to be granted sufficient market approval to fund the development and marketing of even more shitty products. However, over time it was also possible for the competency mix to trend more to the marketing department than the R&D department and it wasn't uncommon for businesses to grow to scale off the back of great marketing and mediocre products. Growth through acquisition is another common way software businesses grew, but this behaviour really just a form of corporate marketing, too. Instead of spending £5m on a customer acquisition marketing campaign, just spend £5m on a raw customer acquisition.
It's more complex than that but all up, I think it's a good thing that the web reset those particular characteristics of market dysfunction.
I think the really interesting thing is that the market - and for that matter vendors - retains that old world muscle memory in that it generally still operates the same way even though we all see and understand the effects of web distribution.
We're in this middle zone where the new measures of value have yet to be fully defined. As a metaphor it's as if there's been some grand reset and every business can present itself online just as effectively as every other business (some still don't, but actually it's not that hard). So, using the old world mechanics it's as if every company can afford full colour double spread adverts in The Times (if only people still read newspapers), Superbowl ad spots or towering glass office buildings.
The old shopfront way of seeing the world is pretty ineffective online but we haven't yet defined a replacement set of values, nor the understanding of how to apply them to filter what's good and what's bad.
My sense is that we'll end up in some mix where modern brand assets like a great website (shop front) packed with thousands of five star reviews and tons of social media validation (word of mouth) will combine with the surety that comes with confirming that some stores on this new high street aren't just the same as those wild west saloon bar facades they used to make movies with.
We just haven't worked out a new language for that yet.