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The advancementof the softwareindustry has hada substantialimpact notonly onproductivityandonGDPgrowthglobally,butalsoonourdailyworkandlife. Software business refers to commercial activity of the software industry, aimed at generating income from delivery of software products and software services. Although software business shares common features with other international knowledge-intensive businesses, it carries many inherent features making it an intriguing and challenging domain for research. Until now, however, software business has received little attention from the academic community. The First International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2010) was organized in Jyv askyl a during June 21-23, 2010. This inaugural conference brought together a strong Program Committee of 52 members with research disciplines from various ?elds of business management and technology mana- mentaswellasinternational?avorwithmemberscomingfrom17countriesfrom South and North America to Europe, India and Australia. Wereceived35researchpapersubmissions.Thepaperswentthroughadoub- blind review process producing at least three reviews for each accepted paper. The ProgramCommittee accepted 13 submissions to be presented as full papers in the conference, equaling 37% of the submissions. In addition, ten papers were accepted as short papers. The accepted papers represent the wide variety of - searchactivityonsoftwarebusiness.Forthepurposesoftheconferenceprogram, the papers were organized under eight themes: business models, business m- agement, ecosystems, education and research, internationalization, open source software and social media, product management, and software as a service. In addition to the paper sessions, the conference program included three keynote presentations and a Business Innovation Track containing best-practice presentations from the software industry. The conference program also included two workshops, three tutorials and an adjunct meeting of the Cloud Software Consortia.

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Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology´s Sloan School of Management, with a joint appointment in MIT´s Engineering Systems Division. He specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in the software business. He has consulted for more than 50 major firms around the world and is the author or co-author of 8 books. The Business of Software was named one of the top business books of 2004 by Steve Lohr of the New York Times. The international best-seller Microsoft Secrets (1995, with Richard Selby), has been translated into 14 languages. Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft (1998, with David Yoffie) was named a top-10 Business Week book.

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