[nologic01]

The consolation, if any, is that monetising any type of software is actually hard and getting harder no matter what business model. Otherwise the profitable "big tech" companies of today would not be mostly advertisers or infrastructure providers.

[breck]

> monetising any type of software is actually hard and getting harder

When you model things from first principles, this is how it ought to be.

Unencumbered symbols are strictly better for most people than enchained symbols. The exception is there is a certain class, the "Royal" class, (who receive revenue from royalties either directly or via stock ownership greater than the royalty taxes they pay others), who have historically derived great monopoly profits from software.

But I think it's now gotten to the point where there is no denying that open source, freely distributed software is strictly better (in the long run). No one is clamoring to put Windows instead of Linux on their phones or deep space satellites.

So the question is: do we continue to make ideas worse for 99% so 1% can have monopoly-level royalties, or do we change the laws?

I used to work at Microsoft and it was fantastic. But I couldn't help but keep in mind that the utopia in Redmond was made possible only because of the Microslavery that IP laws put on everyone else.

[cxr]

> monetising any type of software is actually hard

It's not that much different than other fields—there is an endless supply of businesses/orgs for which for which it is almost an insurmountable obstacle to get them to acknowledge something that they could be doing to better serve their own self-interests and then get their approval to take appropriate action.

(In limited circumstances, it can be easier with software, because devs can coast on the desire of SMBs to feel like they're on the forefront of progress because they're buying in to an app for something that didn't have an app before—or if there was an app, then a newer, shinier sort of app—no matter how shitty and regressive the new app actually turns out to be...)

[DannyBee]

Developer tools is a much smaller market than people think.

It's consistently missed total market value estimates and been revised down, too, no matter whose numbers you use.

Depending who you ask, it's not even a 10 billion dollar market yet (or has just reached it).

Most of that money is also concentrated in people like Atlassian. It's a remarkably small pie.

[cxr]

I follow (what's on the surface of) your comment, but I don't see how your comment follows mine.

[DannyBee]

You are saying that monetizing software is not particularly different than other things.

I"m saying one difference is that lots of other things have a bigger market in which to operate. It is easier in a big market to get a small slice of the pie and be okay. (it may not be easy to get the slice, but once you do, it's enough).

In developer tools, getting that small slice will still not be enough to be okay.

In other words, it is different from other fields - you say "there is an endless supply of businesses/orgs for which for which it is almost an insurmountable obstacle to get them to acknowledge something that they could be doing to better serve their own self-interests and then get their approval to take appropriate action."

That's true, but in other fields, to have a viable business, you don't have to get as many of these folks + whoever is left, to be successful enough.

In developer tools, you do, because the overall market is worth a lot less, and so are individual customers.

[cxr]

You are narrowly focusing on developer tools. (Or not—there are places where you keep saying "software" where it only makes sense to interpret it as "software (sold to other software developers".) The article is about mold, but I specifically replied to the claims of someone commenting about the difficulty of "monetising _any_ type of software".

(I had a whole paragraph about how selling developer tooling to developers is hard, but that doesn't account for all software markets. I took it out, because it made the post too long and was already belaboring a point that was out of scope. I maintain that there are circumstances where selling software to SMBs is way easier than what's on the other side of the fence. Consider: developing a payments app for coin-operated laundromats that allows them to issue credits for people who want to pay with a card instead of quarters vs the business comprising the laundromat itself. The laundromat has geographical constraints that just don't apply to the app developer—who can sell as many copies as they're able to to anyone pretty much anywhere. They can also rip out a huge chunk and repurpose it for a different type of payments app that has nothing to do with laundromats—and the app can be shitty, like most enterprise software, because the laundromat owner is not the user and is only thinking about the fact that the app enables something now that was not possible before. In contrast, the laundromat itself is affected by not just whether there are enough people in the city to carry the business forward, but the specific location within the city where the laundromat is placed.)