Recently many friends talk about industrial software, I can not help but also want to say a few words.

Needless to say, industrial software development itself is particularly difficult. That’s the consensus. I won’t say any more. But in my opinion, the more fundamental reason can be attributed to the market, followed by product characteristics, and finally subjective reasons. Also, the subjective reasons I see are different.

Marketing reasons.

HID2030SK  Many people do not fully realize the significance of the market. The market not only provides financial support, so that software enterprises can survive and raise first-class talents; The market can also provide accurate demand, allowing products to mature. Without a big enough market, the product will never be big.

Twenty to thirty years ago, it was probably a critical period for competition in industrial software. But at that time, the market was mainly abroad, and China had little demand for industrial software. One thing I often say is that the automotive industry is an important driver of industrial software, especially design software like CAD. Who are the specific users of this software? It’s the designer. Did the Chinese car industry design at that time?

HID2030SK  People don’t like to use second-rate software. Industrial software, in particular, has a high requirement for reliability. Because once the software goes wrong, a lot of work has been lost or even serious consequences. If you are a designer, and you can get mature software abroad, who will use domestic immature software? Therefore, the Chinese market is not big, but almost to the foreign monopoly.

I have noticed that Chinese universities and research institutes often “do projects” rather than “do products”. The result is often “the black blind man breaks the stick”, breaking one and losing one.

In fact, the reason behind this is that the market is not large enough and more unstable. Sometimes, when a project is finished, there is no second user to be found in the short term. What to do? If you want to live, you have to do something else. In this way, the “project” will not become a “product”, and it is difficult to mature.

The particularity of software products.

HID2030SK  Manufacturing is often hard money, and there is labor and cost involved in producing each product. Cheap labor in China can lead to cheap prices of material goods. So manufacturing in China is relatively easy to develop. Software is different: no matter how many copies you sell, the cost of development is the same. The advantage of cheap labor force in our country is difficult to exist.

From this point of view, it can also be explained why China does engineering companies (such as MES company) more, less product companies: if people have low personalized requirements for software, users will directly buy foreign mature products. And engineering, of course, is also a hard thing.

To do great things in industrial software, you need good people. It takes a lot of money to get good people to stay and attract them. This is true of Google, Huawei, Ali, etc. However, the industrial software industry is difficult to survive, by what “give big money”?

HID2030SK  In the past, some state-owned enterprises had a certain economic foundation, but due to well-known reasons, the real breakthrough was particularly difficult. Although the government is willing to spend a lot of money to introduce senior talents, it often “buys donkey bones” – real Qianli horses are not willing to come.

In a sense, we are not yet an ideal market economy: the market is segmented by relationships, and whether you use your technology or give you money is often not determined by product quality factors, but by non-technical factors.

In such a market environment, those who can get money are often academic bigshots or people with backgrounds known as “social activists”, relying on the strength of the product itself. Working for the big guys? The big guy is good at writing papers, making reports, and making connections, how can he work? Therefore, the talent team can not keep up.

Chinese enterprises in the field of industrial software are often not too big. Survival is stressful. To make industrial software bigger, first of all, there is room for serious people to live (I know a few such friends). Their living space is large, it is easy to develop.