Software products and services are high tech? New product development strategy for software products and services

High-tech products and services are characterized as having short life cycles and being state-of-the-art. The life cycles of software products and services are affected by the changes in the hardware and software industries; and the changes in the needs and requirements of software users in variety of industries. To survive in the marketplace, software products and services ought to be responsive to these changes. To be so, they must have cutting-edge features and functionalities, associated with the users’ unmet needs and requirements. Unlike hardware devices, cutting-edge technologies in software products and services are not exogenous to the system design and development—they are built into the software systems during the design and development processes. The cutting-edge technologies enable the developer to improve the software product and service in cost and time effective ways. Therefore, software products and services in order to succeed in the marketplace must be high tech. In other words, being high tech is not a product or service characteristic of software products and services—it is a new product development strategy.