Let's first look at deployment destinations for software. Software can be hosted in a variety of locations, the most common being desktop, over the internet (client/server), or mobile.
Desktop Software
Software that is installed on your computer that has an executable would include software like Adobe Photoshop, Games downloaded from Steam, or Google Chrome. The benefit of this is that the software runs direct on the PC and can perform quite well. The challenge here is that we have to worry about the specific operating system and the CPU architecture. The software is compiled for that specific platform.