Complete software company entrepreneurship manual [2]

Technology

If large international companies generally take the pursuit of high profits and market share as their own goals and operate on a customer-oriented basis, then newly-started enterprises aim to pursue technological innovation, technology-oriented. To a large extent, many people dream of creating a new business because they are optimistic about a New Technology Prospect and their advantages in this respect.

Many entrepreneurs come from technical staff in their previous companies.

Cisco has a rival called Juniper. The founder (Founder) of this small company is Cisco's core technical staff in the high-speed Router field, juniper has occupied 30% of the market share in just two years, making Cisco extremely uncomfortable. What's more interesting is that Juniper quickly has its own killer, which is a newer and smaller company, and its core technical staff just ran out of juniper. Several previous industrial transformations in Silicon Valley have resulted in the Continuous Generation of small new companies with the latest technologies and vigor.

Silicon Valley is already a very developed market, and large international enterprises have almost occupied all aspects of the IT industry. However, even in such circumstances, companies like Siebel have emerged, the rapid development of a set of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Programs has basically occupied the U.S. CRM market, even companies like IBM that provide e-commerce services use Siebel's e-commerce program for customer management. Lei Jun, general manager of Kingsoft company, previously wrote an article titled "What are Microsoft doing? What are we doing" to discuss the development opportunities. Over the past few years, Kingsoft has grown from more than one hundred people to more than four hundred people, from pure software to software, and from multiple network leaders. It can be seen that no matter how far the market develops, there are opportunities.

With the development of the network, it will certainly bring many new opportunities to the software industry. Developing software products suitable for network applications and carrying out e-commerce activities is an important direction for the future development of the software market. Some people think that the software sales model will be further changed, from the traditional agent sales model to the national chain sales, and then towards the development of e-commerce, this is the general trend. In addition, software development vendors have launched new products that support the network. For example, Microsoft's. Net Plan is actually the flash of the company's complete transformation. In contrast, China's I software can be said to represent this aspect.

Some time ago, the popular us e * trade company sued the domestic well-known sharing software e-trade express for its infringement of its naming rights, which made us angry for Uncle Tom, we also have a closer understanding of the e-trade Express software: it can automatically publish the Import and Export advertisement information to more than 3000 world-renowned electronic bulletin board and 200 news groups engaged in international trade within one hour. It can be released infinitely without having to register with each announcement version in advance and has statistics on the publishing status. Maximize business opportunities! However, you only need to fill in the real email, phone number, and product information, and then use the mouse to gently. It has brought great convenience to people. It is no wonder that it has caused E * Trade's "eye red "!

Today, with the rapid development of information, it is very important to grasp the opportunities accurately and timely in terms of capturing what you need in the information of skyrocket, this has opened up a broad market for network-based communication software: network telephone, fax, and communication tools. It is worth mentioning that OICQ. Almost all computers connected to the Internet are exhausted with lively and cute little penguin portraits, and related software has also developed rapidly. For example, the oicqad still caused great waves of attention. Let's leave aside the disputes. Let's try to ask how much attention can be caused by any software?

Currently, personal websites and commercial websites are nothing new, but how to let more people know about their websites and how to allow more people to access their websites, it must have been the question of the brains of any webmaster or commercial network manager. To gain a higher level of awareness, you can make a great deal of advertising or live online hype, you can even pick up pornographic and pirated spools, but if you want to achieve "Little donkey, big strength; eat less grass, more dung", you may have to pay a discount. However, there are many successful software cases in this regard. In particular, the most brilliant 3721 websites in the past year. With limited software such as the Chinese website software, the best flying cat, and the Golden Cat's Eye, you can easily obtain venture capital, in addition, it significantly increased Website access traffic and successfully launched a number of hypes. Other real-time news software released by sites such as Sina (SINA), soyou, and tifo has also brought great results to their own development, the shared software released by the authors of various shared software also allows more people to visit their home pages. What's more ridiculous is that, soon after its establishment, the website of the decryption and piracy software surpassed those old websites in a short period of time simply because of the launch of a registration code query software. It can be seen that the combination of software and websites plays an important role in the development of websites. This has also created a new direction for the development of software!

As we all know, in the General Office field, Microsoft leads a team of tens of thousands to dominate most of the market, and Kingsoft holds the banner of national software, with the belief in building an office with Chinese characteristics and Microsoft's fight from DOS to Windows, Microsoft has been fighting from the last century to this century. Now Microsoft is busy pushing Office XP, and Kingsoft's WPS 2001 test version has also published 0.7 million copies. Seeing that a new round of competition is about to expand, the dark horse-the office star-is being stabbed. This is a brand new face, but we have seen a lot from it: the original office system customization function, the original document style link database function. These two functions not only get rid of the concept of a single word processing software for general office software, but also point out a new development direction for office software. We will wait and see if we are fighting together or in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms!

We have discussed the technical direction above. Let's talk about the software itself:

As of now, Lenovo software, the largest news in the Chinese software industry this year, has passed the rigorous evaluation by the British Reuters group and successfully passed the cms2 certification. It has become the first national software enterprise in China to pass this certification! I remember that some media published this message on the topic "software has a hard standard. But can CMM harden the software industry? Mr. Xie xiaoneng, chairman of the Guangdong Software Association, said:

"Carrying out CMM certification has a very good promoting effect on the professional and standardized internal development process of software enterprises, and the ability to use software development has risen to a new level. At the same time, it can improve the credibility of enterprises before their customers and provide more opportunities for enterprises to explore the market, especially the international market. India, as an important software export country, is also widely used in CMM certification. If this is not done, there is no way to evaluate their development capabilities and credibility, it's hard for them to get a big list. In China, software enterprises have paid more and more attention to CMM certification, and some have already begun to apply for certification, or follow this mode to practice, which will be of great help to software enterprises, in particular, the CMM Certification becomes more urgent when some software enterprises are developing in a small manner and transforming to standardization and scale."

For Chinese software enterprises, passing CMM certification is of great significance. The purpose of such a certification is not to obtain a paper certificate, but to stand at a high starting point and use it as a way to improve enterprise management, so that enterprises can fundamentally embark on the path of regular development, improve management, reduce development costs, improve quality, improve productivity and market competitiveness of enterprises, and thus participate in the competition in the international software market. CMM is like a mirror of software production, which can be used to measure the development level and specific gaps of enterprises.

It seems too early to talk about CMM certification when a startup software company has weak capital or technical strength. We may not be able to meet the conditions for CMM certification, but we cannot "let ourselves fall". We must strictly demand ourselves with high standards and practice our internal skills, it lays a solid foundation for the company's development and growth. Imagine a product with a good development direction and excellent technology will be unpopular?

Specifically, a good software has the following:

1. availability. It is a measure of the difficulty of using a product to execute a specified task. If it is summarized in four words, it is "Easy to use ".

2. practicality. It refers to the product's ability to execute tasks. According to the design, the more tasks the product executes, the more practical the product is.

Let's take the typical Microsoft MS-DOS word processing program that came out in late 1980s as an example. These programs provide a variety of powerful text editing and processing functions, but you need to learn and remember dozens of puzzling buttons before you can execute these functions. It can be said that such applications are highly practical (they provide users with the necessary functions), but their availability is poor (users must spend a lot of time and effort learning and using them ). In contrast, a well-designed and simple application (such as a calculator) is easy to use, but its practicality is lacking.

Both are necessary for a product to be accepted by the market, and they are part of the general concept of usefulness. Obviously, if the program is useful but has no valuable functions, no one will use it. If the program is powerful but difficult to use, then the user may reject the program and turn to other alternatives.

3. Popularity. It often indicates the desired features in the product. If people like a product, they are more likely to use it and recommend it to others.

The reason people like a product is often not related to practicality or availability. They may be attracted by the style and attractive appearance of the product, or by the status of the product given to them. People tend to like products that are very useful, but this does not mean that products that are widely used are available.

Software companies of different sizes have different processing methods for these three points. Large companies can establish specialized testing laboratories, purchase specialized instruments, and use other group-centered technologies. Smaller companies can set up a testing team or outsource it to other companies. So what should we do for startups?

Modern communication methods have greatly reduced the distance between designers and users. We may not be able to establish a CRM system, but building a publicity website and collecting feedback via e-mail is within our capacity. If anyone wants to get involved in a field, I think it is not an impulse. In this case, apart from understanding the competitors in the field and related technical barriers, the most important thing is the user's need. "User-centered" is not an empty slogan. During phishing, you bring the bait that fish like, rather than the ice sugar gourd that you like ". We should focus on understanding the user's needs early in the design process.

After preliminary tests, we can put the production on various download websites for users to download, and perform tests as soon as possible and continuously. The only feasible method for software testing is summarized based on experience, that is, if the actual user thinks that the design is feasible, it is feasible. By introducing tests throughout the development process, users can have the opportunity to provide feedback on the design before the product is launched.

There are two types of user feedback: one is software bug, the other is functional improvement suggestions and new features. After finishing the work, we can proceed to the next step to improve the interaction between design and feedback!

In terms of program design, we should try our best to maintain compatibility with the operating methods. There are too many unfamiliar things that will inevitably make us feel at ease. Do users still accept what they fear? In fact, the use of a software, except for functional differences, is ultimately a kind of use habits of the difference. When we are familiar with a software operation method, if the functions are similar, what else do we need to use?

If possible, personalize the software interface as much as possible. Apple's artistic technology concept has won a lot of applause. Maybe "Beauty is good" is too subjective, but this kind of preference will increase your software color!

Technology is the foundation of a startup software company. Without innovation, it is difficult to imagine its gloomy development prospects. Because of this, as the company's development direction, this step must be well performed. (To be continued)