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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: knowledge Automation (ID:zhishipai), author: Xu Yongshuo

Through the main differences between software and equipment, this paper leads to a main contradiction in the development of enterprise software industry: the balance between scale and personalization.

The logical industrial revolution of machinery and equipment has opened the switch of the transformation of human society from agricultural society to industrial society, and a remarkable feature of industrial society is that human beings make full use of fossil energy through machinery and equipment. With the help of tools to achieve production standardization, large-scale, greatly improved the labor force, completely changed the mode of human production and life, and had a far-reaching impact on the social structure.

The use of industrial equipment is the basis of large-scale production standardization, and large-scale is the main feature of industrial society. It is emphasized here that hardware (that is, mechanical equipment) tools mainly solve the problem of large-scale.

The evolution of machinery, the two representatives of the industrial revolution, the Jenny spinning machine and the improved steam engine, as well as the application of Ford assembly line, a typical representative of Industrial 2.0 (three kinds of hardware equipment), realized the scale of production and solved the bottleneck of production efficiency. The Jenny spinning machine contributed to the birth of the factory production mode, and the Ford assembly line matured the large-scale production model, realizing a large-scale production of more than 10 million vehicles per product.

The main characteristics of the early development of the industrial revolution are: the use of mechanical equipment (hardware) tools has contributed to the large-scale industrial production mode, and large-scale production has improved the level of productivity on a large scale. Hardware is a tool to achieve scale.

After visiting Ford's Luchi factory in 1950, Japanese engineer Toyoda Eiji did not introduce an assembly line, but created a unique management model: Kanban management. The main reason for the establishment of Kanban management is that the automobile industry has entered the era of small batch and multi-variety, and there are many working procedures and product diversification in the automobile assembly operation, which brings the difficult problem of matching the personality of materials and products. In the era of lack of information transmission tools at that time, Kanban mode is to solve the matching of product categories and materials with the help of mobile transport vehicles. This is already the bud of personalized configuration.

From the manufacturing dimension, Toyota achieved great success with the help of Kanban model, and finally evolved into the classic manufacturing mode of lean production. Later, after the popularization of computer as the best carrier of information processing and information transmission, it has been widely used in production, and software plays a more and more important role in multi-variety production.

With the wide application of mechanical equipment and the maturity of technology, people begin to use mechanical equipment to solve more complex problems. After industrialization, it has promoted the reform of the social system, the government needs a lot of statistical work in the reform of the old system, promotes the demand for watchmaking, needs large-scale addition and subtraction calculation, and explores the use of mechanical equipment for calculation. as a result, the computer was born.

The early computer, aiming at the differential equation setting of personality, needed a lot of manual time to set up the mechanical device, which led to the huge workload of differential analysis equation calculation. So based on mechanical hardware, personalization needs to be set by complex differential equations, and the time cost is very high.

However, this differential analysis machine inspired John Mochley and John Eckert, who developed the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC, which can do more than 5000 additions and multiplications per second, but it still takes two days for ENIAC to solve specific problems. In order to save setup time, Mochley and Eckert put forward the idea of "storing program computers", hoping to increase the ability to store programs on computers and save programmers a long time to set up. In September 1944, von Neumann listened to the ideas of Mochley and Eckert and put forward the discrete variable automatic electronic computer (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer EDVAC). Then the three men continued to improve the design of EDVAC. In the end, Von Neumann drafted a report, draft EDVAC report No. 1, which described the logical structure of stored program computers, known as the Von Neumann architecture. Later, EDSAC ran the first program to prove the feasibility of the EDSAC architecture (that is, the von Neumann architecture). However, it is too difficult to write programs in machine code, which leads to the birth of programming-friendly notation, that is, assembly language. Later, IBM launched the FORTRAN project, and the US Department of Defense advocated the COBOL language. The popularity of these two languages activated software requirements and promoted the development of the software industry. After 20 years, COBOL and FORTRAN played a leading role in programming languages.

From the birth of the software, we can see that the software is a method gradually explored in order to solve the problem that the computer setting and calculation requirements take up too long setting time.

Software solves the problem of equipment setup caused by multi-variety production after the 1950s, and the birth of software is to solve the problem of personalized setting, so industrial software is to solve the problem of personalization relative to equipment.

In 1953, GE had more than 400000 employees in 125 branches around the world, and the monthly salary statistics of employees cost a lot of labor costs. Later, GE began to calculate salaries using commercial computers. Then the software industry entered a period of rapid growth.

The earliest salary statistics software used by GE, on the one hand, solves the problem of scale, the salary of 400000 employees, and achieves a large scale in terms of data statistics; on the other hand, the salary data of each employee is different.

After the industrial revolution, with the help of tools to achieve large-scale production to improve productivity and stimulate personalized demand, while software balances scale and personality, stimulates the demand for software, and brings prosperity of the software contracting industry.

In March 1955, scientific programmers from IBM founded a computer idiom company in New York to carry out the software contracting business. Early software contracting cost is low, only needs a coding version and a pencil, through renting machine time, low cost to achieve rapid growth, driven by early software demand, rapid cooperation with oil, nuclear power, NASA and so on. achieved rapid development and was listed in 1960.

With the rapid growth of computer idiom companies, the United States has entered a period of prosperity for software contractors. In 1965, there were 40 or 50 large software contractors in the United States, with annual sales of between 10 million and 100 million US dollars. Mainly to undertake personalized customization needs for the organization.

The emergence of the software contracting industry has greatly alleviated the bottleneck of the scarcity of computer programmers and promoted the use of software by organizations, but the software industry has encountered the problem of software scale in the process of development. the scale and personalization of the software itself has become a new bottleneck.

IBM first encountered a software crisis: planning for System / 360began in 1962, when it was initially estimated that the development cost would reach $125 million in four years. However, when the final delivery of the whole project was a year behind schedule, the project invested more than US $500 million, which was four times the budget, and the project members also greatly exceeded expectations, with 1000 programmers developing at the peak.

The scale of this System / 360software project is huge, with a total code volume of more than 1 million lines, resulting in budget overruns, members exceeding expectations and project delays. The crisis of software implementation caused by the large scale of software project.

Notes: the dilemma of software the essence of software crisis is how to balance the contradiction between scale and personalization in software industry. In order to deal with the software crisis, the industry has explored two solutions, one is to promote scale by improving the reusability of software, such as through software production, and the other is to respond to personalized requirements through software engineering. For example, many software contractors build software implementation methodology based on enterprise architecture.

Since the introduction of the concept of Industrial 4.0, personalization has become the main feature of the manufacturing industry, and the balance between product personalization and scale has become the main contradiction, and the concept of software definition manufacturing is also using software to balance personalization and scale. This will further promote the application of software in industry, and the large-scale application of software will aggravate the balance contradiction between software scale and personalization.

Under the spring tide of digital economy, China's industrial software and industrial Internet enterprises have encountered rare opportunities for development. as far as industrial software is concerned, the technology gap is easy to make up, but the management problems of the software industry itself. It takes longer to make up. Not only to adapt to the differences in the needs of different users, but also to obtain sufficient income for survival through large-scale, but also to ensure that large-scale delivery of high-quality and low-cost, in order to obtain huge profits of software projects. How to balance the scale and personalization of software will be a greater challenge.

(disclaimer: this article only represents the author's personal views, does not represent the author's service organization, and has nothing to do with the platform)

A brief introduction to the author

Xu Yongshuo: SAP senior digital expert, before joining SAP, he worked as a consultant in i2 and Servigistics, and also led the early operation of an Internet of things media.

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