How many new application categories have emerged in the past few years? For example, how many new kinds of applications solve group and enterprise problems? Is everyone so busy revising their current applications or porting them to new platforms that they don't have time to develop new ones? Have all the important applications already been written? Or have thousands of markets not had their needs addressed or even recognized?

Why such big applications? Because each new version is loaded with more and more new features. Most users don't use or even know about the added features despite forests of dialog boxes and menus and submenus that hit the bottom of the screen. All those new features have to be documented, so of course manuals keep getting bigger too. You don't hear companies boasting about their featherweight manuals anymore. Software manuals can run to several volumes of hundreds of pages each--and users need to spend lots of time reading those pages to use the applications effectively.

Despite all the new features, users aren't getting the kinds of capabilities they need in areas such as workflow management, real-time collaboration, decision support, and business-specific distributed computing applications.

Some developers claim that over half of their application code is really system software needed to get their applications to work. They have to extend the existing operating system, or work around bugs, or shield themselves from parts of the system that work against what they're trying to do. Rather than hiring people with expertise in a particular domain, such as publishing or accounting, developers have to hire computer systems experts to write user interface elements, printer drivers, line layout systems, fixed-point graphics models, help systems, and so on. Application teams routinely include more specialists in various areas of software engineering than in the tasks that an application is supposed to perform.

Not many companies can raise that kind of capital. An application that involves an innovative concept for a new, unproven market isn't likely to attract such sums. Instead, the economics of software development increasingly favor large, feature-laden applications for large, established markets. In general, a successful mainstream application requires something on the order of 100,000 units per year in sales to amortize the development costs, which implies a market of, say, a million units per year if the application claims a 10 percent share of a given segment. This means that certain kinds of applications are likely to get written, and other kinds don't stand a chance. Most software companies can't afford to target markets of 10,000 or 1,000 or 100 units per year.

Yet there are many more potential customers in focused, vertical markets than in traditional horizontal markets. Despite the personal computer revolution of the past decade or so, over half of the business workers in the United States still don't even have computers on their desks. This isn't necessarily because they can't benefit from computing. It's more likely due to the absence of software adapted to their specific business needs.