
Ask HN: Are there fewer companies selling software now? - curiousgeek
If you look at the software technology landscape over the last 8-10 years, you find many innovations coming from companies that are using software to solve specific business problems: search, advertising, social networks, media and communication (I am talking of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Uber and the like). The needs of these companies outgrew what commercially available software could do, and they were forced to develop in house solutions.<p>Since most of these companies do not sell their software per se (Microsoft being the prominent exception) and maintain their position in the market through other means (network effects mainly), they see no harm in open sourcing their work.<p>But if the bulk of software innovations are coming from such companies, what does it imply about the state of the industry then?<p>It has already led to a peculiar situation where programmers perceive the best jobs to be in companies that do not sell software at all!
======
karterk
Here's another way to look at it: Facebook, Google & Twitter sell their
software to advertisers that allows them to reach their target audience. Here
"selling" is actually a service.

Uber is mostly a software company - the cars are owned by the drivers. When
you pay for a Uber ride, you're infact paying a part of it to the software
which helped you find the ride.

Apart from that, there are huge swaths of enterprise software companies in
every industry/domain you will probably have never heard of. Some of them are
even billion dollar companies.

~~~
throwaway7774
Yes I used to work for Wisetech Global. This is such a company. Recently
floated on Australian Stock Exchange.

------
afsafafaf
Many do sell software. Google is a major software provider. However, it is
things like Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education, for example.
The famed buzzword: software as a service. More and more people are paying
monthly for software. There's also a lot of software being sold to companies
for their work - B2B rather than business to consumer.

As was famously said a few years ago "Software is eating the world."

Even traditional software companies with on-premise licensing rarely send CDs
nowadays.

