Billion Dollar Industries with Billion Dollar Companies are Dead?
Apple's app store is pure software sales, so they must have recently announced that it's not making any money... oh wait app store developers made $3.4 billion last year (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/ios-revenues-vs-android/) which translates to $1.5 billion for Apple at their 30% cut. But its Apples' brilliant hardware that really makes these sales... which is internally identical to the same hardware you get everywhere else and is mostly differentiated by excellent aesthetics and EXTREMELY GOOD SOFTWARE.
Surely this is just a fluke example case, I mean it's not like one company could make €3.438 billion dollars by itself on software like.... SAP did in 2011 (and growing).
But that's enterprise software. Everyone knows that Microsoft's consumer-facing product divisions make the real money... or actually that Microsoft's massive software licensing for Windows and Office in the enterprise props up all of its consumer sales in divisions like entertainment that flip back and forth between small (by Microsoft standards anyway) profit and loss every quarter.
Software sure sounds dead to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
