Having the desire and ability to write software is a great gift. Not everyone can do this since it requires a certain type of person willing to spend long hours planning and debugging code. I won’t say its the greatest gift in the world because we all have skills that can be shared for the benefit of others.

The problem that software developers face is that many projects are never completed. While there are several factors that can cause this, one of them is a lack of focus. When you know how to program computers, there tends to be a desire when using bad software to want to write a better one instead.

For instance, the free Windows application, Notepad, may not meet all of your needs. You want to use it for editing PHP source code, view line numbers, edit HTML, preview web pages, and many other features that Notepad is missing. So, you decide to write your own editor that can do all of this.

Later, you realize that the Windows Movie Maker isn’t that great for video editing either. You decide to write own video editing software which has the long list of desired features that you just wrote down.

Next, the Calculator application in Windows is too basic for the advanced and very technical calculations you want to do. Its time to start Visual Studio and start coding a high end calculator application.

All of these applications are completely unrelated and could easily take an entire year to create and debug. Chances are that you won’t finish any of them because you’ll eventually think of another program that could use rewriting.

The key to success in any area is focus. If your working alone, or in a small team, you need to decide what kind of software you want to create and work solely on that. Concentrating all of your energy in one program will produce a high quality application which will probably be better than similar software on the market. If you try to write many unrelated programs, none of them will be very good and none will attain a large market share.

This applies to commercial and open source software. Writing a good program takes a long time. Its been said that programming is 1/4 of the work in a software business, the other 3/4 is marketing. You need to be focused on one application so you can better market it.

Once you’ve completed your award winning application and made significant profits, you’ll be able to hire programmers to work on this and any other ideas you may have.

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