Software is boring, I heard someone say recently.
Naturally, as director of a super-fast-growing software specialist, I disagree wholeheartedly. But not because I make a crust through developing and deploying software.
Most of us interact with software most of the time without even realising it.
You wouldn’t get out of bed without the software that controls the systems that deliver electricity to your home and powers your clock radio or your charging smartphone.
The radio station would not be able to produce its programs without software. Even if it could it certainly could not broadcast them over the airwaves or via the internet.
Without software, the world would return to rising and sleeping with the sun, or simply sleeping in.
If you’re connected to the local council’s water reticulation system software enables water to be piped into your home as and when you need it.
There would be no hot water for your early morning cup of tea, or flat white, nor any chilled milk to add flavour or pour on your cereal. Without software, you can forget a slice of crunchy morning toast.
We’d have to go back to factory sweatshops making clothes, without software, and we’d need one in every town. Trains, planes, and automobiles would grind to a halt without software, so you could also forget the widespread distribution of products.
Personal travel would be limited to walking and cycling, or you could get a horse, so most people would be confined to working in the town that they live. Most people would have to retrain, as so many jobs today involves booting up a personal computer and either running a process with it or using it to manage business-critical information. They would have to return to manual jobs, as there would be no software-controlled machines to pick up the slack.
The information age, without software, would be over. The world would be thrown back to the days of Caxton’s printing press for the distribution of data – fact or fiction – limited to as far as your horse or bike can carry your printed material.
You get the idea.
Without software, things would be grim.
Far from being boring, software makes the world go around.