" I suspect the modern artists-get-rich era started with Elvis."
A little further back than that, but not much further. Frank Sinatra, maybe. With radio and recordings, for the first time a musician could get revenue from people far away.
"In my own profession, writing compilers, you simply can't sell them anymore."
Compilers, operating systems, browsers... Maybe software as an industry only had a limited lifespan. In the early IBM mainframe era, machines were expensive, vendor-provided software was usually included, and there was not much of a third-party software industry. Now, software is very cheap, and ancillary to advertising or services.
It's the internet that killed paid commodity software. Before the internet, you had to pay someone to burn a CD/floppy and mail it to you, and of course it had to be worth that person's while to do it.
Internet downloading removed all the friction, and prices went to zero.
However, there's still plenty of opportunity doing service, maintenance, custom work, training, etc.
Marketing and promotion is just as costly, if not more costly, than it ever was. I know too many wonderful open source projects that failed and left their author bitter because they thought that merely creating a great program was good enough.
The "build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood fantasy. Even the Beatles went nowhere until they hooked up with promoter George Martin.
> The "build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood fantasy.
So incredibly true.
And even whenever I do try and talk about my software, people usually perceive it as an attack on competing software (you can't say why someone should use your product without implicitly stating why they shouldn't use someone else's); or as shameless self-promotion and advertising (even though it's all FOSS) =(
A little further back than that, but not much further. Frank Sinatra, maybe. With radio and recordings, for the first time a musician could get revenue from people far away.
"In my own profession, writing compilers, you simply can't sell them anymore."
Compilers, operating systems, browsers... Maybe software as an industry only had a limited lifespan. In the early IBM mainframe era, machines were expensive, vendor-provided software was usually included, and there was not much of a third-party software industry. Now, software is very cheap, and ancillary to advertising or services.