"As authors set out to write the component they have no customer requirements to work towards, just an understanding that they must arrive at an end product that precisely covers its subject area - and no more"

You will probably be surprised to learn that the best example of software reuse in action today is the open market, as hosted by companies like ComponentSource that are facilitating thousands of reuse transactions every month. Why is this a surprise? Well, because there is little or no communication between the authors and the customers in the marketplace, because there are no agreed frameworks for these components to work within, and because authors generally are not working to a predefined customer specification. You might expect that achieving reuse in this environment requires a greater degree of orchestration and coordination, but on closer examination you will see that it is actually the very difficulties imposed by the open market that foster greater reusability in the components that it generates!

Open market authors are generally opportunistic, that is, they have a capability or some subject matter knowledge whose value they believe they can leverage via distribution in component form. As they set out to write the component they have no customer requirements to work towards, just an understanding that they must arrive at an end product that precisely covers its subject area - and no more. They know that every customer will have a slightly different run time environment and so they must ensure that they are free of dependencies like the presence of a particular database or messaging infrastructure. They know that their operations will not scale to allow them to handhold each and every customer through the evaluation and implementation process and therefore they must deliver a product that is intuitive and discoverable by the customers that find it. They know that failing in any of the previous activities will dramatically reduce the number of reuses (the reuse count) that their components achieve and thus, directly effect the survival of their very business by damaging their profitability.

In trying to maximize profits by addressing the widest possible audience, while at the same time effectively blinded to specific customer requirements, commercial authors become focused on creating the most complete, concise and generic components possible and it is the authors that achieve the highest form of these three characteristics that become the "best of breed".