[wensing]

I love a good pricing discussing so I wish I knew what you were saying when you say:

The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on eyeballs elsewhere.

And

No one will buy this stuff at the $50/seat the developers would have to charge to avoid the Google and Facebook buyouts.

Can you please re-state? For some reason I can't follow.

[nitrogen]

I'm not the OP, but I read those two statements something like this:

1. The minimum price to sustain development as standalone software is $50/seat.

2. Consumers will not pay $50/seat for this software.

3. Some businesses have been successful with cloud-based monetization.

4. Therefore, the best chance for success is to sell a cloud service, rather than standalone software.

[ajross]

That's exactly it. Though to be fair, I pulled the $50 number out of you-know-where. The point is more that the caramel-latte-priced software model only works for items with huge volume.