If you're going to produce commercial software, here are a few rules that absolutely everyone should follow:

1) Design without a purpose. Everyone knows that commercial software designed for an actual market doesn't sell. Design for a market with few people. Better yet, make sure the market doesn't even exist. A good example of this is the DJvu converter hosted at http://www.convertdjvutopdf.com/. Although few people have even heard of the format, let alone use it, a proprietary converter to the more widely used PDF format exists. Don't let the "freeware" signs fool you. To get any actual use out of it, you have to pay for it. That's exactly how I think software should be.

2) Don't bother bug testing. There's nothing like using some software only to have it bug out halfway through a large, time consuming project. It's even better if you allow the user to cause fatal errors and data corruption in the program simply by having the program running while they have text or other common things in their Copy/paste clipboard as Logicworks allows you to do.

3) Make it useless. Don't let utility slow you down. The off-line IP country finder by Fairdell software accomplishes this in an amazing 1 MB of space.

4) There may be half a dozen competitors in the market already offering software of equal quality for little to no cost, but don't let that stop you from making another Text editor or unit converter.

5) Use up all the memory you can. Just remember that your users are practically begging you to get rid of their extra memory space. Don't worry that your label maker uses up 200 MB. If anything, you should expect thank you letters in the mail from your users.

Keep these in mind, along with a thoughtful disregard for common sense and you'll be on your way to making millions from your next proprietary quadratic solver.

Thanks. Most of the linked programs are ones I've actually come across for other reasons.

This is hilarious.  I thought you were going to be serious at first, but then realized.  Very funny!

Nice Qwerty, I won't forget to follow this LOL =D

7)  The best thing to do is develop for a platform that no one knows about, such as you uber secret new OS for IBM's old super computers.

When you do create your software, make it a violation of the license terms to run it on any hardware not made by your self, even if other hardware is compatible.

you might want to disable smilies there. 

Good idea.

Quote from: fb39ca4 on March 14, 2011, 05:36:58 pm

8) When you do create your software, make it a violation of the license terms to run it on any hardware not made by your self, even if other hardware is compatible.

We're referring to Apple, right?

Of course not. Otherwise we'd have to include rule 10:
10) Make your software development IDEs only work on one platform so you can code only for one platform.  Be sure to make it do an automatic full background check / TSA style airport security search before use.