Software for systems biology has been under development since the 1950s and has accelerated considerably in the last five years. However, much of the development has been repetitive and there has been little genuine innovation. In this talk I wish to briefly discuss the history of software provision in systems biology and will try to address the question why the academic community has found it so difficult to innovate. In many cases the software developed today is little different in functionality from the first packages that were written in the 1950s. Ironically is it industry that seems to be taking the lead. In particular, Microsoft is funding new theoretical developments at their systems biology centers and MathWorks has developed a substantial dynamics software package (SimBiology 2.0) for their Matlab product.