SMS Software doesn't rust

I got a support request in my email yesterday. I used to get these in the nineties which was about the last time I was able to write software. The support request was for a product that Dialogue had licensed to a large corporate customer a long time ago. The customer has been happily using the software ever since, but now had a query about whether and how it could access the software in a new way.

The software in questions was Dialogue's PageMail Expressway application which we created in about 1998. It is a multi-user version of our first SMS application PageMail which was distributed widely from 1995 to about 2000.

The company with the query has been sending about 15,000 SMS messages per month to their staff and wanted to integrate SMS into a new CRM application they had.

I was a bit out of touch with how the software worked, but after a bit of digging found the necessary documentation and forwarded it to our support team. What I noticed about the documentation and the source code was that it was a decade old! I was quite surprised because in that decade a lot has happened in the world and in terms of software and operating system environments. I was impressed that the software still worked and that it was still useful.

I did a quick check across the office to find out who had the oldest software in use which still made money. I won hands down (partly because I'm twice as old as most of our staff!).

I remember how hard it was back in the mid to late 1990s to persuade companies that SMS was a useful technology, but the ones who gave it a go, certainly found that it was 'sticky', and as the technology involved is so simple it can be connected up to many different systems to add to their utility. We spent a fair bit of time designing our software well so that it could be integrated into whatever the customer wanted to use it for, and those design principles look like assuring the software a continued lease of life.

I perhaps shouldn't be surprised that software still works a decade later, it isn't subject to the same  environmental impact as say a car or an office chair. It doesn't use something which has become obsolete, and provided computer systems are backwardly compatible, it will continue to live.

So the only thing which was ever likely to go wrong was the the customer would cease to need SMS in their business, and I've not found many businesses that go down that path.

So my message for the day is that SMS software has probably got at least another decade to run.

Comments

[Abhiram Modak]

I have a Product in mind for Dialogue using Microsoft Tag. This is mobile+print product which can be used by advertisers in a advertise+contest mode. Let me know who should I talk to

Regards
Abhiram
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