Future of Software 18 Sep 2015 What does the Future of Software really look like? The answer to that question, and really the context of the question, depends greatly on your PERSPECTIVE within the software community. While a software developer will inevitably view the question and resulting answer from the perspective of the code base, an end user will simply be considering what the UI looks and "feels" like, as well as what business function the software will perform. So, it will be from those two contexts that I will be speaking in this post... First I will speak from the perspective of the End User, because without the end user there would be no reason for a software developer to exist. In most cases, the end user will care about things like how user-friendly is the UI, on what type of device can I run the software, how responsive is it, etc. In the beginning of my career in IT it always amazed me how little end users tend to focus on the actual function being served by the application, but how much attention they would give to little details like, "I like this color better than that one" or "Why can't we have a hot key for this?". However, over the last 20 years I have grown to understand things from their perspective a little better. You see, what the end user really cares about is THEIR BUSINESS, and their PROBLEMS!!! I know this might come as a shock to some in the IT community (sarcasm inserted here...) but the end users rarely care about the type of technological framework the application is built on, or the data persistence layer supporting the application. As a matter of fact, whenever I have talked about these types of things with a group of end users I have, almost without exception, received the "glassy-eyed" look of extreme boredom. With this in mind, let us talk for a minute about why the users care about the seemingly insignificant aspects of the UI. We must remember that these people are the END USERS who will be depending on the system day in and day out to perform the work which represents their livelihood.
