the issue is that "we" has been moving, fairly quickly, from the techies or business workers that used to primarily use the internet to, basically, everyone from soccer moms to preteens/teens to grandmas.
grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such. teenagers mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social.
there's still tons of people out there that need useful software, and useful software is a great cash cow. now that population, that niche that needs your software, while still probably sizable, no longer makes up a measurable segment of the internet.
i'm building an app that will be marketed to a group of maybe 50k-100k people. thats a negligible percentage of the internet-users at-large, but its still way more than enough to (hopefully someday) make me a nice income stream.
edited to add: social aspects of apps are how applications have been moving to monetize themselves while maintaining free-to-use cost. people need to return and view ads frequently for bills to be paid, if the users aren't dishing out the money themselves.
i don't talk about it because it has nothing to do with this topic. thats more in the vein of how to build good software, niche analysis, and monetization.
the issue is that "we" has been moving, fairly quickly, from the techies or business workers that used to primarily use the internet to, basically, everyone from soccer moms to preteens/teens to grandmas.
grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such. teenagers mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social.
there's still tons of people out there that need useful software, and useful software is a great cash cow. now that population, that niche that needs your software, while still probably sizable, no longer makes up a measurable segment of the internet.
i'm building an app that will be marketed to a group of maybe 50k-100k people. thats a negligible percentage of the internet-users at-large, but its still way more than enough to (hopefully someday) make me a nice income stream.
edited to add: social aspects of apps are how applications have been moving to monetize themselves while maintaining free-to-use cost. people need to return and view ads frequently for bills to be paid, if the users aren't dishing out the money themselves.