Reflections on the Technology Service Industry: Starting with Parking

Yesterday, while searching for the exit in an underground parking garage, I couldn't help feeling a flicker of irritation at its winding, poorly signposted design. Such planning clearly fails to give adequate consideration to the end-user experience; perhaps the designer was a hastily drafted intern, focused only on getting the task done while neglecting the convenience of actual use.

This scene reminded me of the software technology industry I work in. In recent years, riding the wave of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation," the software industry has enjoyed flourishing opportunities. Yet behind this rapid growth, hidden risks lurk. Many projects are launched in haste, with product designers and technical architects constantly thrown in at the deep end, rushing from one project to the next, utterly overwhelmed. Sometimes one person is juggling five or six projects at once; under such conditions, the quality of delivered software projects is naturally hard to guarantee.

Looking back on those days, we were always racing against schedules and deadlines, with little time to think deeply about users' needs or to carefully polish every detail of the product. This mindset of "completing for completion's sake" is just like that intern who designed the parking garage—focused only on finishing the task while ignoring the final result in use. Such software products may temporarily satisfy market demand, but they struggle to earn users' long-term trust.

Yet time is always the best agent of distillation. In the blink of an eye, we have arrived at 2025. The changes of these two years have been nothing short of transformative. From the media, we can sense adjustment and transformation across industries. AI reigns supreme, layoffs are sweeping through every sector, and there is less work to go around. This looks like bad news, but it has actually given the industry a rare chance to catch its breath. People finally have time to stop, to think, to distill, and to re-examine the direction of their growth.

We at Lingser are no exception. After years of moving fast in small steps, we came to realize that a technology service business should not take on every job that comes along—we cannot blindly pursue project quantity while neglecting project quality. We therefore decided to focus on the few fields we know well and concentrate our energy on doing things well in them. This choice may cost us some projects in the short term, but in the long run it helps us strengthen our technical capabilities and build core competitiveness.

Focus is the inevitable path for the software industry's development. Only by focusing on industries and on technology can we deeply understand users' needs and polish high-quality products. I believe that in the days to come, as the industry continues to settle and adjust, more and more fellow practitioners will choose focus and excellence rather than blindly chasing quantity. For the software industry as a whole, such a change is undoubtedly a positive signal.