[tikhonj]

There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they're driven to build and sell very specific software to very specific organizations.

[iroddis]

The J language actually provides a lot of the niceties of the core Q / kdb functionality. It even has Jd, which is an on-disk columnar database. I don’t know if it counts as being commoditized, as the price in terms of time and effort to learn the language is still quite high.