Software is hand made

Recent comments here by Anton Philodor made me realize something important about software, that it's hand made.

Despite the rise of new languages, new tools, and new ways to find bugs, all aimed at increasing productivity, the fact remains that software writing today is still a craft.

Creating good software is a group effort, but it's done by trained craftsmen. It's not a painting, but neither is it a car. It's more like a piece of Wedgwood.

I recently finished The First Tycoon, a fine biography of Josiah Wedgwood, who was a contemporary of Adam Smith and (although he never knew it) one of Charles Darwin's grandfathers. While his name is now a byword for luxury he was, in fact, a potter. His Etruria Works was in fact a crafts shop, and might be considered the Redmond of its day.

While it took management and direction to make a fine pot, it also took skilled craftsmen. In his book Brian Dolan describes how Wedgwood's main business rival, Matthew Boulton, tried to get into the pots business against Wedgwood and failed. His quality wasn't as good and he had too many rejects.

Boulton later backed Watt's steam engine, which transformed the world far more than Wedgwood did, but such a device does not yet exist for creating software. When we talk of competing with China and India, we're talking about competing against trained minds, not machines.

If we could fully automate software production, as the steam engine automated manufacturing, it's possible the open source movement would cease to exist. But so long as PCs remain essentially looms in software production, or kilns to continue the Wedgwood analogy, capitalists won't hold all the power.