this are, in many ways, more a product than a service. It's the same few things, with the same price, with the same organization, replicated N times in different places of the country.
Btw what's wrong is that if you are creating a successful product you should focus on the product. This is how sofware works.
Photoshop is cool? It wins on the market, sells a lot of copies, they can focus more on the product. Immagine this turned into a service.
Photoshop is cool? You run a service of help desk and consultancy about it. Tons of people needed and high costs. Want to serve N customers? You need N/K people. Does not scale, you don't focus anymore on the product but on the service you are selling.
There is no "this is how software works." Software is the result of someone's work. If that person wants to sell that work, good for him. Who are you to decide how someone else should make a living?
Why do we persist in maintaining this silly premise that "Software" is somehow special or unique? It's a product just like anything else and as such it can be marketed, sold, rented, leased or just given away freely by anyone who makes it.
I think you misinterpreted my words. I mean, if you want to make money from software you should try to make money from the product you are building, not from services you (or everything else in theory) can give about the product.
So you can focus on your product and make it better and better.
No, I didn't misinterpret your words. My question is why should _you_ be the arbiter of my business model?
If I decide to make money from software by using it as a service, why shouldn't I? Maybe my natural gas prospecting software is world class OSS that I downloaded from SourceForge and tweaked a bit, but the real money comes in because I bundle it with my well-drilling services that I couldn't otherwise sell.
You're trying to limit what other people are doing to what you can imagine, and that's what I take issue with.
So long as people are paying, what's wrong? This tends to lead to a crappy product, but there's no law of physics or economics mandating that. (If the product is crappy enough, people will stop paying for both the product and the service.)
this are, in many ways, more a product than a service. It's the same few things, with the same price, with the same organization, replicated N times in different places of the country.
Btw what's wrong is that if you are creating a successful product you should focus on the product. This is how sofware works.
Photoshop is cool? It wins on the market, sells a lot of copies, they can focus more on the product. Immagine this turned into a service.
Photoshop is cool? You run a service of help desk and consultancy about it. Tons of people needed and high costs. Want to serve N customers? You need N/K people. Does not scale, you don't focus anymore on the product but on the service you are selling.