Most startups and scaling businesses do not know that software code can get stale and moldy, expiring like a loaf of bread. And when you are taking the most critical steps to prove the viability of your MVP and build it as fast as possible, it can derail your path to market.

You likely have used 20% of your effective software lifespan already.

If you are one of the founders happily developing your MVP for six or… sometimes even 12 months – think again. How many customers did you sign up for your product at that time? Most likely, you have used 20% of your effective software lifespan.

Software code has an average effective lifespan of 5 years.

That's right, as a rule of thumb, based on my experience, software code has an average effective lifespan of 5 years. At the five-year mark, your competitors can reproduce 100% of the product you have already built. They can do more with your product than you could use five times the technology power at a fraction of the cost. After five years, if you cannot capture the market share you had intended, your competition will have surpassed you because of technology.

For example, AWS has been consistently lowering the prices of its computing platform. GO, and Rust is becoming more popular within their space.

Moore’s law is very much alive in 2022

This Law is the reality of working with product development software. Despite being pronounced dead, Moore's Law is alive and kicking. By the time a standard project starts, is developed, and is brought to market, there is a high probability that some brilliant people have already figured out how to do the same type of tasks and programming efforts - faster, cheaper, and more effective.

Real-world examples of how code expires – and Moore’s Law is doing its thing 

1. The world changes faster than we want. As human beings, we tend to think linearly, while technological progress is exponential. Meta / Google / Nvidia / Tencent started pushing towards the Metaverse. How many of your current software products or ideas will work inside Virtual or Augmented Reality environments estimated to take off by 2030? I would be surprised if anybody but a few people answered positively.
2. Technology becomes more sophisticated and effortless.
   1. For instance, are you still using your .NET 4.8 app in production? Did you know that building a REST API on .NET 6 from scratch takes a fraction of what it used to 5-6 years ago when .NET 4.8 was 'the thing'?

   2. We used to build video game engines from scratch.

      The video game industry has seen one of the most recent failures in the entertainment industry. For example, the video game Cyberpunk 2077 was built on a custom-made rendering engine that originated many years ago.

      CDProjekt RED recently announced that they were switching to Unreal Engine 5 and stopped the internal game engine development. They spent a great deal of money to build the original software, and after the launch, executives decided to use 3rd party software and stop doing internal engine development.

   3. How Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix) first company, Pure Software, met its demise. 

      Pure Software wrote its system in C++ in the mid-1990s. This was a time when Java language showed up and took the market of business applications by storm. Hastings mentioned in his book that Pure Software wasn't fast enough to adapt and change the systems to a more productive programming language – like Java.

   4. Are you still using internal and manually managed CI/CD tools?

      For example, all the cumbersome efforts of configuring a CI/CD server for a .NET environment were solved in 2022 using just three lines of code in GitHub Actions. GitHub has been saving companies much time with shorter code; this is a significant development.

   5. Netflix engineering manager said they would rather rebuild the platform serverless

      Four years ago, at the re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, the engineering manager from Netflix said that if they could, they would rebuild their whole platform on serverless. The manager said this because serverless computing was beginning to become famous. They started building their streaming platform 15 years ago, so it's all based on virtual machines now, and they have a long way to go until they switch entirely to serverless solutions.

3. Behavior and expectations of technology by people evolve rapidly.

   Five years ago, having your website responsive in under 3-4 seconds was okay. In 2022 – do you remember ever waiting that long? If a website doesn’t render < 1 second, I move on to doing the next thing. If the company is not dedicated to providing me with the best possible user experience, I’m not willing to spend 2 or 3 seconds of my life waiting for the technology stack to ‘boot up. I move on. So do your existing or future customers.

Exciting software tools at our disposal today.

As engineers and software designers, there are exciting tools at our disposal today that did not exist in the past—inviting you to stay tuned to my next blog post in 2 weeks about https://retool.com, where we’ll talk about how the Product Manager from Bruno.ai was able to drag-n-drop his CRM in a matter of days with almost no developer being involved (and the iOS app is on the way!).

As a startup or a business poised to seize new opportunities, now you know that code gets stale; it ages at a rate of 20% in 12 months. It does not stand the test of time. Therefore, projects lose their juice competitively if your MVP product takes too long to be completed. Your dev team should be fast and ask you many questions about your business. Expect your competition to be using the latest and greatest software toolsets. Moore's Law wouldn't have it any other way, would it?