We use the word Product when we refer to apples from a store, an application for delivering food from a restaurant, or a cloud service. If you come to think about it, it turns out that the closest analog to a grocery store is the App Store.
Let's figure out what such a concept as a Product can conceal. What are the properties of IT products, and how are they different from, say, potatoes or books? When does something stop being an abstract object and become a product? When does a piece of code become valuable?
Object vs. product
Let's look at a few regular objects and see how they turn into products and how it happens. Let's say you have:
- A banana;
- Peter the barber, your friend
- A pair of sneakers
- A flower you sketched
At first, bananas grew on a tree and were a part of nature.
Then a company came to deliver bananas to stores — a banana turned from a simple fruit into a commodity. Some customers want to pay for them, and middlemen can help to bring them to your table.
Your friend Peter the barber has always been fond of hairdressing. He practiced his hair-cutting skills by giving free haircuts to his friends. Now, he's experienced, and he wants money (or chocolate bars) for a haircut. In other words, Peter renders a service.
Another example — you produce furniture. You do not have an offline store, but you deliver and assemble it at their request. This approach allows you to cut the price. In this case, your product is also a commodity, furniture. And also service of delivery and assembly.
A product can be a commodity or a service or a combination of them that can be offered to the market, and which will cover the needs of users. In other words, if you create something for yourself, or something grows in nature and doesn't participate in the exchange or sale, or is not shared between people, it is not a product.
Sneakers are a product because you came to the store to buy them. Someone created them from natural or synthetic materials, packaged them, and sold them. If this model has been on sale for several years and is worth the cost of its production, then people buy it.
A sketched flower in your notebook can be hardly a product. Unless it suddenly turns out to be a masterpiece, and you could sell it or exchange him for something valuable. Several times.
IT products
Products that we consume exclusively digitally, or the digital technology itself plus the infrastructure that enables it, are called IT products. But the foundation remains—it is still a product or service or a combination of them that is sold and/or transferred in the markets.
For example, IT products can include a tablet, a computer, sports watch, headphones, and data centers (data storage). Digital IT products include Photoshop, the IntelliJ IDEA, an integrated development environment, and an application for meditation or reading e-books. But can you call any piece of code or application an IT product?
Suppose you've composed an application for tracking the water that your cat drinks. You like this app, and you've already thought about how much money you'll make to become the new Zuckerberg. But your friends refused to install it, and after you posted it in the App Store, you had three downloads. You've decided to keep your head up and tried to find partners to supplement the functions of your application for the services of veterinary clinics. However, nobody agreed, and you had to drop the idea. It could not become a product. Although, you've gained invaluable experience!
Conclusion
- A product can be a commodity, a service, or a combination;
- For a product or service to become a product, it must be transferred, sold/participate in an exchange;
- An IT product is a digital product or a device with which we consume digital products. They play by the same rules as "regular" products.