Software industry

Software industry is the collective name given to businesses related to the production and maintenance of computer software, with its roots in the IT phenomenon. The industry also includes services regarding software, such as training, consulting, and maintenance.

This table, derived from the Software Magazine 500 for 2005 [1] shows the total amount of revenue brought by software and software services companies, per locale.

Location	Total Revenue Millions of US$
CA	111836.8
NY	101485.1
TX	40606.1
WA	34744.5
MA	19524.9
PA	18470.0
NJ	9141.3
MD	8564.9
MO	5486.0
WI	3729.7
VA	3553.3
NC	3497.9
IL	3490.2
OH	3404.1
FL	3350.4
GA	2835.0
CO	2522.9
MN	1483.3
MI	1305.7
AR	1225.9
OR	716.8
Japan	603.7
AL	573.3
England	550.3
VT	520.7
Canada	498.7
AZ	388.6
NH	296.6
NE	292.8
UT	247.6
SC	201.5
CT	102.4
MT	61.8
IN	55.1
IA	51.1
ID	47.3
KY	43.7
NV	23.1
BC	15.8
OK	10.4
NB	7.8
KS	7.6
Germany	4.4
ND	2.1

There are mainly two types of businesses base on software industry; one takes the direction of building properietary software and selling it like Microsoft for example. This involves issues that to the cost of the software itself lie Software Licesnsing and Software Protection from cracking and piracy like using Hardare Dongle.

The other type of business is based on developing open source software. The main return on investment here comes from selling the srvice not the Software itself like Training and Support.

Although they have a lot of buisness in properietary software, Some companies like Sun and IBM participate in developing free and open source software to deter from monopoly of other companies and to take a portion from their market share. The act Netscape took is an evident example of this and we see now how Firefox is popular.

See also

• Personal Computer
• Software
• Software engineering
• Software engineering economics

External links

• Software Industry Professionals website
• Software and Information Industry Association website
• Software Magazine website