Software Gold Rushes

The advent of a major new technology often means the beginning of what I think of as a "software gold rush." Companies and individual entrepreneurs rush into new technology areas, hoping that a little bit of hard work will produce a product that will make them wealthy. I've personally seen software gold rushes with the advent of the IBM PC and Microsoft DOS operating system, the migration from DOS to Windows, and the growth of Internet computing. More new-technology gold rushes will undoubtedly follow.

Gold rush software development is characterized by high-risk, high-reward development practices. Few companies have established competitive presences in the marketplace during the early days of a new technology, and many of the new-technology gold nuggets successful new products seem to be lying on the ground, waiting for anyone with the right mix of innovation and initiative to pick them up. Software 49ers rush into the new technology, hoping to stake their claim before anyone else does. The typical gold rushers are two guys working in a garage, legendary dynamic duos such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, and Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc.

The practices employed by software developers with gold rush fever are usually associated with hacking rather than engineering: informal processes, long hours, little documentation, bare-bones quality assurance practices in other words, hero-based code-and-fix development. These practices require little training and low overhead, and they expose projects to a high risk of failure.

The odds of striking it rich during a software gold rush are about as good as they were during the California Gold Rush for every success story, there are hundreds of projects that go bust. But these small failures aren't nearly as interesting as the huge successes, and so we don't hear very much about them. Two guys who work hard and don't strike it rich aren't a very good news story, unless by chance there's something interesting about their garage.

As with the California Gold Rush, software projects run with hero-based development in gold rush periods are successful from time to time. The gold rush projects are so enormously lucrative when they do succeed that they convince software developers that high-risk practices can work, and thus the rare but widely publicized successes spread Gold Rush Fever and help to keep hero-based practices alive.