While the dream of building software out of reusable parts is an old one, both understanding and practice are only slowly approaching points where we can address the issues of how to actually do that. This talk draws together the arguments for components by considering the interaction of market and technology forces. A brief overview over the state of the art of building and deploying systems based on components is followed by a high-level review of some of the (significant) open problems in this area. The talk aims at a broad audience and assumes no specific knowledge or experience with current component software technologies.

Clemens Szyperski is the author of the award-winning book "Component Software - Beyond Object-Oriented Programming" (Addison-Wesley, 1998). He is a software architect with Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, and an adjunct professor with Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He received his PhD under Prof. Niklaus Wirth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland, performed postdoctoral research at the ICSI, UC Berkeley, and is cofounder of the companies Oberon microsystems, Inc. and esmertec, Inc., both in Zurich, Switzerland.