Software is a form of product that will deteriorate and expire with time. With this in mind, how easy would it be for you to switch software from your preferred tools set to a new one?

I try and not be too dependent on the software that I use on a daily basis. I do have a favourite set of tools that I use but I'm always conscious of the fact that whatever I'm using might not be around tomorrow.

Take for instance my to do list. I've been using Todoist for some time now. What would happen if Todoist stopped trading next month? Or even next week? Barring a natural disaster, I'm pretty confident that most services, including Todoist, will allow a small window of time for you to transfer your data across to another application of your choice before that company closes down.

The good thing about software as a product is that there's plenty of it. We're spoiled for choice when it comes to software and with the now common place app stores from various technology companies, there's an app store for most major hardware platforms.

What happens though when software becomes a dependency?

I've heard many people say that their preferred software product for a particular task is 'X' and that they just couldn't do their job without it. Perhaps that's true if you're in a specialist job working on the next wave of new technology and innovation, but for most of us this just shouldn't be the case. We should not be dependent on just one particular brand of software to get the job done. If you're so dependent on one particular software product then I'd say that you're narrowing your choices down too much.

The text editor is my daily tool for writing and cutting code. My preferred text editor is Sublime Text, but for any reason that Sublime Text was to stop being supported or even cease to exist, then what's my options?

We'll I've played with Vim enough over the years to make the jump to that, and there's a number of other text editors that I could pick up like Chocolat that would do the job just fine. Yes, I may have invested a considerable amount of time getting to know the shortcuts keys of Sublime Text but if I had to then I would comfortable picking up something else. We should always have options to fall back on for the selected tools that we use on a daily basis. In most cases this second set of software might be products we've tried in the past or something that we previously have experience with.

Investing time and effort into a particular software product is fine if it's something that you will use on a daily basis for about 8 hours a day, but anything else is simply a product or tool that could be replaced with alternatives already on the market or a custom made option if needed. Software isn't for life, it's simply a temporary means to an end until we find something better that works for us. With this in mind, are you to dependent on the software you use?