Hardware growth is essential for software development

■ As a senior developer, what would you say about the domestic industry?

Korean society is becoming too one-sided. It's been about 7 years. As the software concentration phenomenon continues, too much human resources are being concentrated in that area. What Korea really lacks is hardware.


For example, Korea does not make motors. It produces them under Japanese license. The robot industry is the same. Most of the serving robots distributed domestically are imported from China and are sold and distributed only with domestic brand names.

Korea is not making hardware. If you try to make the brain (SW) first without making the body (HW), how will it work? Embedded SW can be a starting point, but embedded software also needs a body to contain it. Therefore, the design of the mechanism or machine that can make the body should be the main focus.

Meanwhile, SW startup companies are concentrated in Gangnam. They pay high rents but their sales are insufficient. Companies that operate mainly through services are greatly affected by the economy. When sales are poor, they keep firing developers, so there is no way that talented developers will remain.

■ SW bias phenomenon, what is the problem?

I believe that the data center fire and the Kakao and Daum downtime clearly revealed the problem of SW bias. This is what happens when business capabilities are focused only on SW engineering and investment in server or infrastructure engineering is insufficient.

Even in the field of university education, many people teach coding in mechanical engineering departments. It makes sense to teach electronic engineering to apply it to machines, but if basic skills are not supported by mechanical engineering, it is useless to develop SW capabilities. As the industry hires only IT personnel, talents with mechanical design capabilities are gradually disappearing.

People often overlook the reason Microsoft (MS) supplies the OS: selling SW is to sell hardware. The reason Apple has iOS is to sell iPhones and Macs. MS sells a lot of hardware, including keyboards and mice, as well as OSes. SW sales are only possible when HW production increases.

In Korea, no one is making HW, from UAM to robots and autonomous driving. Everyone just gathers and talks. For example, Company A has a research staff of PhDs from prestigious engineering schools. The annual labor cost is enormous, but there is no actual development. These companies can attract investment by receiving investment from large corporations and attracting national projects, and they can be maintained for 10 years. However, it is questionable whether there will be any actual output within that time.

■ What kind of vision is needed in the long term?

In traditional advanced countries, SW is supported by sales based on HW. The way forward for SW companies is also to launch HW.

Continuous investment in HW will be necessary for SW development. The same goes for the metaverse. Ideas such as distribution of own terminals to activate the metaverse are needed. For example, you can consider building a system that allows managers to monitor workers in real time while using a dedicated laptop for the metaverse.

To achieve this, HW and SW developers must build up simultaneously. In addition, we must not spare money on experienced and senior talent.

The last thing I want to say is that while many people focus on what they can't do and what's difficult, successful people focus on what they can do easily. You need to spend time realizing what you can do.

The same goes for software. Software is embedded in hardware. So the outcome is fixed.

“Make hardware”