In my mind, “PC market” means personal computing devices of all form factors. Any other definition is splitting hairs to serve your desired outcome.
Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.
There is no market for PC software. Not counting the software that ships with the computer, the average person spends approximately nothing on software for their PC. At best they might buy a virus scanner and QuickTax. Platform fragmentation and the relatively difficulty of finding and installing software for the PC played a big part in destroying that market.
Yes, but part of the draw of software in general is that one vendor can theoretically serve the entire market, whereas a car dealership can only serve a given area.
That rings true, yet casual users are not the only profitable market for software. Not by a long shot. Look at companies like Microsoft, Autodesk, and Adobe. They do very well selling professional software--software that's never going to translate well to a phone-sized screen.
Well, how many companies are there that are selling some sort of proprietary software and still making money? I'd wager there are hundreds of thousands of them around the world. Also, software can now be sold as a service, so the market is just transforming, no?
When you go beyond the consumer web and desktop markets, software actually sells for a lot of money. There are tons of industry-specific and line of business software markets that are very lucrative, but they aren't immediately obvious to an outsider.
Just going off of the AAA game market your statement is obviously incorrect. That doesn't get into productivity software, engineering applications (CAD, 3D modelling, etc), or the very large variety of enterprise desktop software to name just a few markets.
Not everything is a web app these days and many people still prefer to own their software instead of being a recurring revenue source for the same functionality month after month.
Yep, and that's what I love about software. If you build and sell something on your own, pretty much everything is profit. You don't have that in many industries.
Agreed. It always comes down to a base equation of who is willing to do what kind of work for what kind of reward under what kind of circumstances.
After a decade of software being a desirable job and everyone trying to get into it, we can bet good money that it's now a buyer's market rather than a seller's market.
Presumably they haven't been talking about the same thing. You could sell software in catalogs for home computers, but that dried up. Then you could make web apps, and that dried up. Then you could make mobile apps and that has dried up.
(*Note: note completely, and I am sure many people know someone who still makes some surprising amount of money with this one weird trick/app)
When the next platform comes out (VR? Cars?) there will be a software shortage and you will have a few years to code up some stuff. Then the market will demand more elaborate and sophisticated software that will require a team, some investment and a lot of time.
the problem with those industries is that the software is closed because of the hardware. while on one hand it is ready for disruption, on the other it is locked down by ever changing hardware interfaces outside of your control.
You would also have a hard time convincing the buyers to not use the manufacturer software and instead use yours.
The distribution cost of selling software is far lower than selling a physical product. For example, to manufacture and sell cars, you currently have to worry about supply chain considerations and chip shortages. You don't need to worry about this to sell software to an interested purchaser.
Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.
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