Funded in its initial years by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this project's goals are to characterize the nature of the emerging industry, analyze trends and identify and monitor important industrial, educational and public policy issues. We are reporting here on the efforts of one area of the SCIP's research, the Software Industry Study. However all computing involves software.
Software has an increasingly critical impact on almost every industrial and government organization.
A Study of the Commercial Impact of Software A group of researchers in Stanford's Computer Industry Project has been studying the role of software in the computer industry. Through student literature reviews and interviews with twenty senior Japanese executives and government officials, we developed an understanding of the key problems plaguing the Japanese software industry. In the fall of 1993, using the same methods we used in Japan, we turned our attention to the prepackaged products segment of the US software industry. The findings reported here are qualitative results and represent continuing areas of our research. Besides our literature reviews and interviews, we have, so far, attempted only a few pilot surveys to investigate these issues more systematically.