Computer users around the world while might be using different applications to do their paying job (e.g. a proprietary chemistry or biology app, or a high-end astronomy app etc) they all use the same “basic” applications in their daily lives: email clients, web browsers, IM, calculators, media players, image viewers, system utilities etc. Now these applications come for free with the operating system and there are plenty of completely free alternatives on the web too. But (especially younger) consumers should realize that once upon a time these “basic” free apps were costing real money. So, what happen to this software market of (basic today) applications?This market is pretty much dead. While there are a few shareware around that make a “better media player” or a “better email client”, the reality is that no one expects to make money out of such apps anymore. So, what happened? What made this huge software market (10-15 years ago) to fail?
There are two basic reasons that constituted the end:
1. Advanced Programming Tools.
The release of Windows95 and the Visual Studio back then, brought development into a new level. Almost everyone could reuse some COM objects, the RAD tools and the advanced debugger (at least compared to Watcom C++ or Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, up to that point in time) and put together a functional app in minutes. Give it a few hours and you had a small utility up and running. Give it a few days and anyone could craft a game, or calculator or an image viewer. As years went by the development tools and frameworks became even more powerful and matured and so operating system vendors themselves started to include such applications with the OS itself. When you install any recent flavor of OS today you get an email client, an image viewer and/or manipulator, a web browser and in some cases even a video editor and a full Office suite.
2. Open Source.
With the help of the #1 reason above, mostly on Linux, programmers around the world joined efforts to bring the GNU dream to life: create Free applications for everyone. GNU has succeeded so far creating worthy alternatives for almost all of these “basic” applications and in some cases superior products (e.g. Apache, Mozilla). In other cases though OSS development hasn’t caught up yet with some applications found on Mac OS X or Windows (e.g. a usable video editor, a Sherlock-like app) or the OSS offerings are just not as polished yet. Even with some shortcomings, the OSS development community has offered and continues to offer valuable products to users, for free (and this includes even server software, not just consumer software).
Given the reality of the consumer software being driven to “free” status, software houses have moved their efforts to different products:
1. Shareware software that doesn’t yet exist in this “free” world, e.g. DVD-movie editors and burners, special-purpose “basic” apps (e.g. a Rendezvous text editor, or system utilities extending the underlying OS)
2. High-end software that now needs to be more high end than before in order to distinguish of its free imitations. Photoshop now needs to lengthen its gap from Gimp and MS Office from OpenOffice.org.
3. New kind of software enters the picture in the consumer market, e.g. more and more people at home are interested in astronomy or pro-like video manipulation and music generation.
The conclusion is that the software market evolves. Twenty years ago people might had to buy extra an image viewer or a scientific calculator for their computer, for quite some respectable amount of money. Ten years later the software these would be easily accessible for much less via the shareware market. Give it 5-6 more years and you would get them for free, plus the user would have to select among many free ones.
This very evolution of the software market has probably killed a lot of companies in the process (companies that could not keep up with the evolution) and so many would sound sour regarding all this. However the fact remains that by offering for free the “basic” needs, the market itself “pushes” software companies to search for alternative products and in the process to (sometimes) innovate. The whole thing is probably a struggle for many software houses, but the thing is, it will continue to be. Market realities are not that different than jungle laws: the strongest and/or more intelligent will survive.
This trend of bringing more commoditized software to users for free will continue to happen (the same way a radio receiver/player device costed a lot of money in the 1940’s, but it costs just about $3 today) and businesses will continue to push themselves to offer better products in order to make a difference. At the end, it is the consumer him/herself and the software science that ultimately win. And from where I stand, this is a good thing.
I disagree that the shareware market is shrinking – it is just evolving into other directions. For example, I believe that there are still untapped markets ready to explode in the following fields:
– a real WYSIWYG video editor.
– a decent DVD burner app which is easy to use (movies, menus, etc).
– a video titling app.
– a decent SoundEditing app.
– a decent messaging/IRC/email/video chat forum thingie.
– a decent home layout/decorating thingie (wall colours, furniture, etc).
– an easy to use HTML web page / photo / diary / blog editor
Come to think of it, there are apps which do all these things, but none of them are EXTREMELLY easy to use. I guess that shareware authors need to focus on inventing a new UserInterface for existing app concepts. Once the interface is done, a market will be born revolving around the concept. Adobe did just that with True Type fonts and Premiere. Look at them today…
> I disagree that the shareware market is shrinking – it is just evolving into other directions.
But that’s what I said too. That these software houses now create different kind of applications, because the previous range of applications used by shareware developers don’t sell anymore.
This was a really great column. You’re absolutely right about the role of open source and free beer software, and what areas are left for companies to innovate with.
As for the evolution of the software industry, its a natural symptom of capitalism. Markets evolve, businesses are destroyed, and new ones are created. One point, to note, however, is that as software becomes a commodity, the software market wll start behaving like a commodities market. The days of Microsoft’s monopoly-driven 80% profit margins are over. Firms in commodities markets don’t make enormous profits. They make enough to make it worthwhile, and that’s it. They make some extra profit, beyond the basic normal profit, for a short time while they innovate, but that dissapears quickly as the market catches up. Such is capitalism.
Eventually(and I don’t know when), the same thing will happen with Operating Systems. Microsoft can continue to ride out the popularity of applications tied to their OS, but that won’t last forever. Actually, this will hurt Apple before it hurts Microsoft. I guess Apple can always be happy with being a niche player, but it will always be a niche player. Nothing wrong with that, but most people just aren’t going to pay for an OS AND propietary hardware when linux’s gui becomes as good as Mac OSX.
As pretty much said you’re just raising the abstraction level up. Nobody is doing assembly anymore and with java/c# and other highlevel languages, more and more, you’re just putting various components together. That’s a good thing because there’s still a lot of software that needs to be done and always will be. Actually, this is one of the reasons why MS has been so successful. It’s the tools. That’s fine if you want to use vim or Emacs, but if you want to be agile, it’s not always the best way to be efficient – especially when you still have tons of linux programmers using c.
As far as shareware is concerned, it’s a bit sad that it doesn’t get much play in the linux world. Personally, I don’t really want to be spending all my time writing free sofware. I would love to be able to use the new KDevelop to write some shareware apps….to bad the QT license sucks for the small guy.
I couldn’t agree with this analysis more – and the provision of functionality rolled into the OS / SDKs is what is driving this forward, in both the OSS and MS models. A great example of this is the Microsoft Business Application Frameworks being rolled in as an ‘in the box’ product in V.Next of VS.NET. Once upon a time, companies used to make money from selling SME CRM and line-of-business apps, and they were all more or less the same. Now, MS is rolling those components into the platform, and suddenly the bar is raised for all those CRM and line-of-business vendors.
It’s not just the shareware and smaller home software packages that have been commoditized and essentially reduced to zero cost, it’s happening all over the software map. To a degree we’re already seeing the commodization of the operating system, but even more evident is for example the change in the database market.
There used to be a huge market with the likes of Foxpro, Dbase, Paradox etc, today they are all but gone. Even industry heavyweights have to consider what happens when the likes of MySQL and Postgres become good-enough for 95% of all work. Today if I start an application development project, I’d have to have a _extremely_ good reason to go with a non-free-as-in-beer DB backend.
So basically nobody will be getting rich writing Yet Another Database in the future. You might however run a company taking these free components and creating some sort of coherent system for a specific business. While the business of writing shrinkwrapped packages is going down the toilet, new opportunities and markets are emerging! Who wants to return the dark ages of paying for, say, an text editor?
I see a commoditized computer market. Think “PSX/XBox2” but better. Its $200-$400 and managed automatically through a service. This will lead to the near destruction of the Computer Technician position as well as a severely reduced SA position. Think “Services”. Get there now.
“One point, to note, however, is that as software becomes a commodity, the software market wll start behaving like a commodities market. The days of Microsoft’s monopoly-driven 80% profit margins are over.”
I think you are mistaken about this.
Microsoft Windows is not a commodity. Its only available from one supplier and while there are alternative operating systems – they don’t run MS Windows applications and they aren’t preinstalled on 95% of PCs sold.
While you might make a case for Wordprocessors being commodity products the MS word file format remains the dominant, most widely used and accepted file format – this is a Microsoft monopoly.
MS has many years of comfortable margins ahead of them.
The fraction of software houses — companies selling soft-wares (goods packaged as computer code) is and has been small for decades if it has ever been important to all but a few companies. Almost everything created for use on computers is either for personal use or for corporate (internal) use.
Yet, this small fraction of computer code sellers gets alot of attention and admiration. Most people aspire here probably have thought or attempted to produce “products” even when customers ask for custom solutions not caring a whit about a “product line”.
The best I can tell is that occasionally, one program can sell to a large number or nearly all potential customers…raking in huge amounts of money. Kind of like winning the lottery, “It could happen to you!”, but typically does not even if the program has ample merits.
Along those lines, many people will agree with this editorial and I do too to some respect. The part that discusses evolution is wrong, though, both for computer code and for species.
The “survival of the fittest” is usually interpreted to mean the strongest or most powerful, though that is not what it means at all. In biologial systems, the best adapted and most prolific are sucesses — they are the most fit — not usually the strongest or the most powerful. For most organisims extreeme strength is exceedingly wasteful for the benifit it returns. Example: A bacteria or virus that dominates and then wipes out it’s hosts is not better suited to one that is less agressive and causes little harm but lingers on for weeks or months. One that has a short life span, thus increasing chances for benificial mutations, is superior to one that has a long life and occupies where decendants might thrive.
This analogy works for computer code too, though only in a limited way.
I suspect that the data will become a more important “sell” factor than the program itself in the near future. Or they give the program away for free, and ask money for the data.
Prime example is the free music players, with an integrated music store.
Other examples are, an image viewer that comes with allot of high quality photos, word processor that comes with allot of templates, web-development program that comes with cool themes, a route66 like program.
I mean, the cool thing about say, Garageband is that it comes with allot of loops, and high quality software instruments. The program in itself is allot less important.
>> So basically nobody will be getting rich writing Yet Another Database in the future. You might however run a company taking these free components and creating some sort of coherent system for a specific business. While the business of writing shrinkwrapped packages is going down the toilet, new opportunities and markets are emerging! Who wants to return the dark ages of paying for, say, an text editor?
Yeah, the opensource movement has done a nice job of gutting the software industry. Well done! It kills the ability of small developers to produce anything that cutomers will buy, leaving only the big boys like Microsoft and IBM to develop software. And all these coders writing open source software are ultimately contributing to the demise of the companies that actually employ them and pay for their life styles. So again, I say bravo!! Well done.
I believe that big, expensive commercial applications like “proprietary chemistry or biology app, or a high-end astronomy app” such that Eugenia mentions will soon become commodity in much the same way as the basic ones have already. This article makes some very interesting points but I think the way it implies that the software industry is about to be reshaped to become a business of low margins is quite incorrect.
You could compare the (low margin) software industry pictured in this article with what agriculture is today. Hard work, low profit, a fringe in society. It has always been this way. The only difference is that in the early days, the standard for what you could call an “intellectual” job was very low.
These days, someone working in the software industry is largely considered to be a worker in one of these intellectual occupations. Regardless of the commoditization of software, this will continue (IHMO). Customising software and creating solutions for clients will continue to be a job requiring large amounts of skill.
Also, my experiences have shown that the skill of someone’s work will largely determine the amount of money they see at the end of week. In other words, the value the person is between the client and the boss.
Finally, it’s difficult for me to imagine how an industry with such creativity and *shudder* innovation could turn into something low margin and crude, lacking innovation. In my opinion, it will change in method rather than value.
BTW, forgive me for any poor grammar or badly expressed ideas. It is very late here!
The fact is, the market is pretty distorted right now because of lock in policies of major software companies over the past 2 decades. Read Microsoft here. The thing is, how else shall the hardware makers compete. Simple, bundle software for free. Make sweet hardware and put free software in it. The high end stuff will still require custom apps, like in any other industry, but the 95% stuff can be done easily with OSS for example. So the company that makes the best hardware should sell the most.
The reason they will be able to do this is that they can et incredible cost savings. If it costs IBM $150 dollars to get an XP/Office bundle, and they sell 10 million PCs, the cost is $1.5 billion in a year. With OSS, they do not have to pay this, if they contribute 150 million along with Dell, Hp and others to a pool, of a fund, they can save a fortune, and still provide quality software to their customers, and they can charge slightly more for their overall package and make some of that money Microsoft is making now. Either Microsoft brings prices right down to a point where OSS developers think its not worth it, or OSS will march on.
Yeah, the opensource movement has done a nice job of gutting the software industry.
Agree, everything is opensource society’s fault! Nothing to do with the fact that the gigants are buying out small companies or outright stealing their ideas. Nothing at all! Just blame the OSS.
There is a general trend towards bigger and bigger companies, not only in the computer software business. I think that there are more to it than just a bunch of altruistic computer geeks that like to code software in their spare time.
“It kills the ability of small developers to produce anything that cutomers will buy, leaving only the big boys like Microsoft and IBM to develop software.”
That is a bit shortsighted, if I may say so.
The one and only reason you and I were not out in the woods hunting today is because our society makes it possible to produce food so effectively that you and I can go do something else, because we don’t have to hunt for food.
That is the basis for all the wealth we are enjoying today. Because we have discovered more effective ways to produce food and goods, we have the opportunity to produce new goods.
This has happened over and over in history, for example with the arrival of steam engines or the mechanisation of agriculture only shortly ago.
You are right that if we find more efficient ways to produce certain goods, like for example open source, that there will be a lot of jobs lost.
But since the same goods are produced for a lower price, somewhere along the line someone saves money.
So, somewhere there is money to pay for new goods. This forms an opportunity for people that have lost their jobs to be innovative and come up with new products people are prepared to pay for.
And you may or may not like this, but it’s the reality people have been facing for centuries. Nothing new here.
However, this does not mean it is not painful or harmful for people that lose their jobs, because it is. And I certainly do feel sorry for the people that are in that situation.
A good reference on that topic is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S. Raymond.
The point being that things change. It’s unreasonable to think that someone could sit down for a week-end and come up with an application that is “marketable” nowadays.
It’s the price of market evolution. In the beginning there are only a few players and you came make a living relatively easily. However, as more people enter the market, you need to “innovate” and eventually only the big players can really compete.
It’s too bad but it’s like that. And not just software, as I was saying, think Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, etc. It used to be that there were mom and pop’s home improvement stores, but now they are gone.
The future? Custom business applications in niche markets. Find a need in a very specialized market and focus on it.
I don’t know why programmers are so surprised with the change in the software market. It had happened with every other market on earth.
Do you think that programmer is something different as a chemical engineer for example?
Programmers are going to compete against each other for a shriking market and only the good ones are going to survive. It happens everywhere. It was time it happens to this market. I think it was unfair that a programmer, that doesn’t contribute to society more than a chemistry or an engineer for example, had a really easy life. It was too easy to them to get a well paid job. Now you are going to compete with other programmers as everyone in this world do.
One problem I see with this is that once the free or bundled app becomes good enough, what incentive is there to bring out a new app that may be much better?
Will people pay for an app that is much better or simply live with the free one thats good enough?
I suspect that most will just live with the app that is good enough.
Good article, and it spurred some original discussion too. I would like to add two comments:
First, just because an app is included with the OS, that doesn’t make it free. I think the term “bundled” is more appropriate, and people pay for the entire bundle. It is a different sales strategy than 20 years ago, but I think it was a natural progression, a result of the Home Computer market where most people are all doing the exact same things with the computers. Years ago use was more specialized; not many people needed a browser for instance. Now that everyone needs and uses a browser, e-mail client, etc. it only makes sense to bundle these apps with the OS.
Second, there’s a software category that’s still an exception, entertainment. There are Shareware / Freeware games available, but they don’t even come close to commercial products. And there are no high-quality games “bundled” with Windows.
Best Wishes,
Bob
One problem I see with this is that once the free or bundled app becomes good enough, what incentive is there to bring out a new app that may be much better?
——————
Recently I was reading about about some of the history behind some of the more famous creations of Doug Englebart and Xerox PARC (windows and mice). Apparently these were invented based on the findings of a psychologist (whose name, sadly, I forget) who studied childhood development, and described a phase in early childhood when children point to everything they’re interested in (because they do not yet have the sophisticated language skills needed to decribe things in words instead). That idea of pointing to everything led to the invention of the computer mouse.
Yup, that’s right; forty years later, our prevailing computer human interface is still based on the behaviour of small children. Watch a toddler in a toy-store, and you see the inspiration behind the invention of the mouse.
Sooner or later someone will invent a new approach, one more suited to the way adults normally interact with their world. When that happens, we’ll suddenly find that all our “good enough” programs are no longer good enough, and there will be a huge opportunity for new software development.
(By the way, it occurs to me that the Segusoland app, recently discussed on OSnews, in fact has incorporated some elements of the way adults rather than toddlers think: most of us, in working towards a goal, start with the goal in mind, then eliminate possibilities until we see a clear path to the end result. Rather more sophisticated than pointing to the shiny red toy and saying “Gooo” !)
Not long ago someone said that computers today are at about the same level of development that automobiles were at when the Ford Model T was state of the art. Even long after the Model T, “improvements” consisted of things like more cylinders in the engine and bigger brake-drums on the wheels; we’re in this phase of personal computer use, where “improvements” consist of drop-shadows on menus and alpha-blended cosmetics on apps. Nothing really new, just prettier and faster.
Just as the arrival of electronic fuel injection obsoleted every “good enough” carburetor in the automotive world, I suspect there will be a time, hopefully not too far in the future, when something comes along to obsolete most of the “good enough” computer apps.
Incidentally, I have no crystal ball, but I have great doubts that spoken-language interfaces will be an improvement over the keyboard; I talk for a living (I’m a teacher) and I know how tiring it is to talk for several hours. Not to mention the cacophony that would result from fifty people in an office all simultaneously trying to talk to their computers…
-Gnobuddy
I agree with most of the points in the article, but regarding point 3:
3. New kind of software enters the picture in the consumer market, e.g. more and more people at home are interested in astronomy or pro-like video manipulation and music generation.
I don’t think this is a new development – both the PC and Mac have long had “leisure” software: multimedia encyclopaedias, language tutors, greeting card design, home makeovers, ‘Teach yourself Algebra’ etc. There’s also a huge range of educational software stretching back to DOS days. There is nothing like this in the open source camp. That is why I believe Linux will still have a hard time getting on the desktop of home users. Go to your local PC store and you’ll notice the shelves are predominantly stocked with this type of leisure software. Many Linux users seem to think a few games on the Linux platform is all that’s needed for Linux to prove its multimedia credentials, but that’s far from the case. If you have a young child and want some educational software, what can you find in the open source camp? What if you’re a student? There’s a substantial amount of software tailored to school and college curriculum’s. I think, in general, for both the PC and Mac platforms, software is heading more and more towards programs that offer multimedia, “leisure”, or learning content.
Several points (some already made):
1. The upgrade cycle is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Eventually users perceive for-pay upgrades as a subscription fee rather than a bargain-priced new version. This is especially the case where upgrades are driven by document format changes or licensing that locks software to particular hardware rather than genuine consumer demand.
2. Little in consumer software is rocket science. Duplication of core functionality is seldom a show-stopper. In most cases, functionality eventually becomes available on royalty-free terms (LGPL, BSD or even MS’s libraries). Accretion of knowledge in the royalty-free realm may take time, but eventually it happens.
3. Non-expert users have a limited number of features they can usefully employ. Once identified, duplication of an important feature set by competitors is relatively easy.
4. For non-business users, the difference between adequate functionality and top-notch functionality is seldom worth the $100+ price of most polished retail software.
5. Moore’s law renders execution speed less relevant as a feature.
6. Where exchange of documents among muliple users is important, document format compatibility is a key “feature”. Its potential for used for anti-competitive purposes is obvious. (Notice that applications focused on viewing or editing open, mature document formats tend to be given away for free.) Also obvious is that this will be a key battleground in the MS v. OO (and AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.) war. It may also be one where political attacks may be useful. For example, perhaps a government could be convinced to adopt an open document format for their use and availability of data (it is pretty appalling that, even before the Bush administration caved on the MS anti-trust settlement, there were US government documents accessible only in MS Word). Large companies (for instance, IBM) could also do the same. (As an interim step, perhaps the OO people could publicize the features of MS Word that OO has conversion problems with so that organizations could seek to cause their users to avoid such features.)
7. Subscription fees will be able to be obtained more easily by providers of services that inherently cannot be shifted to client or inherently require periodic or continuous updating. This is why Google has generated such stock market interest. (It does not say much for MS innovation that MS allowed Google to grow up under its nose, long after MS “woke up” to the Internet.)
1. The upgrade cycle is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Eventually users perceive for-pay upgrades as a subscription fee rather than a bargain-priced new version. This is especially the case where upgrades are driven by document format changes or licensing that locks software to particular hardware rather than genuine consumer demand.
Which of course leads to longer upgrade cycles in areas where people demand a higher level of change between versions. The most obvious example of this should be Windows itself, so long as Microsoft doesn’t announce an interim version between WinXP and Longhorn (and an interim version may even show this to be the case, as people would be less likely to buy that version if they feel there isn’t enough to justify the cost).
2. Little in consumer software is rocket science. Duplication of core functionality is seldom a show-stopper. In most cases, functionality eventually becomes available on royalty-free terms (LGPL, BSD or even MS’s libraries). Accretion of knowledge in the royalty-free realm may take time, but eventually it happens.
If GNU has shown us anything, it’s that people are perfectly willing to replicate ALL of the functionality of existing software for one reason or another. Just because I can drag & drop an Excel component into my software and allow anyone with Excel installed to use my software to manipulate spreadsheets doesn’t mean that I won’t try to find a better way to do that if my customers don’t have Excel.
3. Non-expert users have a limited number of features they can usefully employ. Once identified, duplication of an important feature set by competitors is relatively easy.
The problem here is that even non-experts use different subsets of those features. Entire groups of users can be lost by missing one feature. That being said, you can duplicate a large amount of functionality in a short time and then add functionality from there according to user feedback, but I’d recommend lengthy user testing before actually trying to sell that software.
4. For non-business users, the difference between adequate functionality and top-notch functionality is seldom worth the $100+ price of most polished retail software.
This depends on the user, though, and the software you’re looking at. For many users, the $100 office suite is equal in functionality to the $400 office suite, and the free office suite is like a pack of happy pills. However, over the long term, the functional differences often get to those users. For those that find their experience replicated things are fine, for those that find little annoyances in their day-to-day lives, they’ll feel cheated by the $100 software and just throw away the free software.
5. Moore’s law renders execution speed less relevant as a feature.
Execution speed, perhaps, but it certainly has not come anywhere near rendering wait times less relevant as a feature. The most important features of the last 2 versions of MS Office and Windows for many users was the faster load times of the software. Office especially added many more features for the IT workers and developers than for the end users outside of the load times being decreased. As computers get faster, users expect to be able to run more software at the same time with more features and be able to do so at least as well as they did with older software with fewer features, even on computers better equipped for that older software than the newer software. People don’t buy hardware at the speed of Moore’s Law.
6. Where exchange of documents among muliple users is important, document format compatibility is a key “feature”. Its potential for used for anti-competitive purposes is obvious. (Notice that applications focused on viewing or editing open, mature document formats tend to be given away for free.) Also obvious is that this will be a key battleground in the MS v. OO (and AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.) war. It may also be one where political attacks may be useful. For example, perhaps a government could be convinced to adopt an open document format for their use and availability of data (it is pretty appalling that, even before the Bush administration caved on the MS anti-trust settlement, there were US government documents accessible only in MS Word). Large companies (for instance, IBM) could also do the same. (As an interim step, perhaps the OO people could publicize the features of MS Word that OO has conversion problems with so that organizations could seek to cause their users to avoid such features.)
To say the least, the government almost single-handedly moved most of corporate America to MS Word and Excel. The government shifted, then the government contractors shifted because they had to read and produce the documents. Then anyone doing business with contractors shifted. Then the people doing business with them. Office found it’s way to the desktop mainly because all of those people working with Office at work occasionally work at home and don’t like the document incompatabilities and the shift in the method of work that comes with different interfaces. The new question, I think, is whether or not the government can be made to figure out that XML-based formats are in their best interests, allowing people to use whatever they want to edit documents, and how that will impact our storage needs (though I’ll admit Word documents are bloated and probably drove storage needs far enough that switching to a text-based format wouldn’t be an issue).
7. Subscription fees will be able to be obtained more easily by providers of services that inherently cannot be shifted to client or inherently require periodic or continuous updating. This is why Google has generated such stock market interest. (It does not say much for MS innovation that MS allowed Google to grow up under its nose, long after MS “woke up” to the Internet.)
It’s hard to blame MS for not being able to stop Google. No one else could, either, even though there were people out there that were actually doing well in Google’s market long before Google came along. MS never did well in that area, and still doesn’t have a solid position in internet services of any type. Subscriptions are the pipe dream of anyone that can see their markets falling out from under them. Microsoft wants people to subscribe to software because they see free software (as in beer and freedom) eating their markets, though slowly at the moment, and they see people taking more and more time between upgrades on MS software because of the diminishing returns in new versions.
While I agree with the heart of the article, one thing I would like to point out is that where Eugenia says that Visual Studio of ’95 was better than Watcom C++, I must disagree. The debugger in Watcom had some really intense capabilities that Dev Studio (current edition) still cannot do. One simple example was single-stepping through code; how many times have you stepped over a function that you meant to step into? With Watcom you could literally turn back the hands of time or step backward through the execution path, all variables and memory reads/writes being reversed along the way. Very cool.
Trying to lock in jobs and wages has been a timeless effort. New ways and technologies have always driven prices down. Sure we like Computer developer wages.. But computers have destroyed whole fields of jobs.. Secretarys, file clerks, assembly-line workers,repetitive processes that were once done by real people that like to think that their job was important.. Automobiles, Oil industry, Plastics industry, have all destroyed jobs in other industries… YOU, the IT worker have destroyed 1,000,000’s of jobs.. “What goes around, comes around”. A really valuable worker is the manager who can eliminate labor and increase production. And THAT is progress. If you want to be part of it, learn to write,maintain software that eliminates labor costs.. It’s the bottom line…