Probably the years of selling software as a product are gone. Actualy, few have really made money with that. Most in the last 40 years lived selling services and administrating legacy systems.

Even Microsoft Iīm sure they are concerned about how to sell Windows as a service, not as a product (they are developing a MSOffice version to be sold as service already, OpenOffice/Google is going this way too). Oracle database is gone, Pg/MySQL is out there, thats why they are buying companies that sell more services than software, like ERP ones, Peopleware, and developing service based applications. Think of Google: does they seel anything at all?

Source-code seeing or decompile and pirates are problem for everybody. And even if they were not, by the time you release a new version of something you have been developing for years, there are plenty os competitors in the same niche.

Companies like Basecamp, Google, Yahoo and many other Web 2.0 enabled simply donīt care about the language - and so donīt the user. In all the companies, the software is only the way to guve the final user the real revenue - information faster and better, collaboration, etc.

Diego de Lima

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