Blueberry's product development service gives clients the benefit of 'on-demand' technical expertise to help them build products they can market and distribute themselves.

We can offer a wealth of experience in the design and development of standalone or shrink wrap applications and online products – and we can combine online and offline technologies to deliver the best of both worlds.

Creating software programs that will be installed and used by thousands - or millions - of people brings special requirements:

• The product often needs to be designed to work on multiple versions of Windows – sometimes it must work on Linux and Mac too.
• Security is a big consideration – most major companies now impose strict rules on how software can be installed, and the software installation program must work reliably in all cases.
• Upgrades and updates must be planned for – the program may need a special “check for updates” function.
• Testing of the software demands a lot of attention to ensure reliability.
• Often, the company behind the product needs to consider how to charge their end customers. Frequently, an online store and invoicing system is required.
• Copy protection should be considered.

Most general software development companies have little experience of these issues. Most will have the skills to write the core application – but without the experience of actually releasing a mass-market application, the issues above are likely to be overlooked.

Blueberry has a unique expertise in this area: not only have we created many separate applications for customers, we also have a sister company, Blueberry Software, which has developed and published a successful product for 6 years.

Whether your software product is only at the concept stage, or you have a fully documented specification, you can be confident that with Blueberry you'll be in safe hands.

In recent years, there’s been an obvious shift away from standalone or shrink-wrap applications – more and more, people use the web to do tasks previously done on their PC.

There are a good number of reasons for this trend:

• Eliminating installed software reduces support costs.
• Online systems generally don’t have a piracy problem – something that has dogged the shrink-wrap market for years.
• Marketing to customers of online systems is much easier – with downloadable products, it’s much harder to connect sales back to marketing activity.

However, online isn’t necessarily a panacea – creating an online product is not suited to all applications, and it’s generally more expensive:

• The tools and technologies used for creating rich internet applications are currently quite weak, making development more expensive – although Silverlight promises to change this.
• If you provide your product online, you’re paying for the server costs for all your users – for a million-user application, these can be quite serious.
• The pace of evolution of web technologies means that development investment can easily be wasted – if you choose the wrong technology platform, you might find there are no developers available to support it in three years' time.

These issues make it essential to plan any online product development carefully – and to talk to people who have real experience of the issues – people like Blueberry.