It is miraculous how Joel Spolsky can turn a topic everyone knows about into a very interesting piece. His The Development Abstraction Layer lays out the situation most of us have been, are now, or will be in the (near) future. How many developers are really aware of the infrastructure needed to run a company?

Anyway, how does all this apply to µISVs? The whole point of µISV is not to have the (comfy) abstraction layer and to handle all that yourself. Is it possible and if yes, how? Let’s see…

True µISV consists of a single developer/manager/boss and maybe one assistant, usually a spouse. The office is the bedroom, or the spare room, or the attic. We build our stuff on a computer, and it is very easy to buy one with a decent maintenance contract. Getting a fast Internet connection has never been easier and the uptime of one is generally very high for a very low cost. Since you work at your place, you can organize things like quiet office and adequate ambient temperature yourself.

What about graphic designers and testers? The former can be outsourced, while the latter unfortunately can’t (at least it’s harder to get the right person that’ll do the job well) – you’ll have to do the testing yourself. Marketing you don’t want to outsource as it’s a primary component of your business, but yes, there’s nobody to do it but yourself.

As long as you have a partner to do the tech support and misc administrative things, you should be just fine assuming you don’t hate marketing and testing. Selling is easy, once you’ve made yourself visible – there are zillion of payment processors out there and shipping software is trivial over the Internet.

That said, look what happened to the few µISVs that got absorbed by NewsGator (Bradbury Software for example) – they seem to agree that while µISV model was great for them, having someone else to take care of “the rest” and leaving them to do just the product development has been even better.

As long as you are aware that the abstraction layer exist and that you can’t ignore it you’ll be fine running a µISV. However, if you’re one of those that see the management, marketing, sales, tech support and administration as “overhead”, think again about establishing your own company. There’s more to product development than meets the eye of the average software developer, because the product is much more than just the source code/technology.