I’ve been reclassifying the section of my website that shows which clients I’ve worked with in the past, and in which sectors they work.
Since we first configured the admin system for the site about five years ago, there has been a slightly unsatisfactory category named ‘Software Developers’. Into this have gone, to date, all companies whose output appeared to be software-centred. So that wrapped together both those companies that were in the business of developing solutions, to order, for other people; and those companies that were actually in the businesses of developing and marketing a product of their own, with a specific purpose in a specific industry sector, but which happened to be ‘software’.
It doesn’t work any more, does it? If we lump together everyone who makes something that is essentially software as being in the ‘software’ sector, fairly soon no-one will be in any other sector.
The world has changed and clearly a company which makes a specialist software product used across, say, the insurance industry, might be judged to be not so much in the software sector, as in the insurance sector.
So I’ve reclassified my sectors.
I now have a category named ‘IT – Solutions, Hardware and Infrastructure’, for everyone who develops commercial solutions for other people to order, manufactures hardware or provides technical infrastructure.
Everyone else joins the ranks of the industry for which their application or service is developed.
