[mtrimpe]

What's also missing in this discussion is that you can get programmers to get their companies to pay tons of cash.

Building a consultancy company around a technology product is probably on of IT's most classic business models.

[ibdknox]

That is certainly true, though I haven't seen many IDE-based consultancies. In our particular case, that wouldn't have been the right direction - none of us want to be "programming", much less doing it at other people's whim.

[mtrimpe]

I meant to refer to Eve and not LightTable.

From what I understand something like Eve is begging for a hybrid product/consultancy approach...

Putting personal preferences aside it would by far be the most logical path towards building a big business out of it.

[ibdknox]

Ah yeah, Eve has a ton of interesting business opportunities around it, everything from on demand computation/hosting (heroku) to collaboration and versioning (github). Consulting or even just building products of our own that are much easier to maintain/faster to build is also an option.