[boomlinde]

> Agile uses the term 'Product Owner', but if you're developing an intranet for Acme Inc, is it really a product?

Approaching this from a purely semantic perspective: yes, a product is something that is produced as a result of a process. Not "in the sense of a piece of software to sell to multiple players in a market", but that's a completely arbitrary distinction that you drew yourself, so it isn't really an argument against calling someone a "product owner" of a single customer product.

> Once the new intranet site is released, is Acme Inc suddenly going to hire a lot more people, increasing the "market"? Will new features generate more "profit" for the intranet?

Maybe Acme Inc find that the product that they have paid for have benefits to productivity, but are willing to pay for continued development to refine it further?

Having worked on a lot of "one-off" type projects I think that it is important to maintain software gracefully. Existing customers will ask us to roll out new features on short notice, and having built the product in a way that lets us adjust and add to it easily enables us to sign deals at competitive prices.

That's not to say that this always happens, but I am less suspicious of this as an ideal.