> I don't want to be in the support business (acknowledging that some support is always required, paid for or not). I want to be in the software business.
A problem with this is that the pure software business doesn't exist anymore. It was a temporary historical phenomenon, centered around the 1980s, but nowadays people simply are not offering to pay money just for a disk with a program on it. (The few major exceptions are grandfathered in by network effects. If Microsoft Word were released today, nobody would buy it.)
People are still offering to pay money to have their problems solved; as you acknowledge yourself, this is a bullet you inevitably have to bite. You can think of this as having to be in the support business because that's what people are willing to pay for, or you can think of some other slant on it, but that's where you have to go because that's where the money is.
Or as one writer put it more succinctly: Software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.
A problem with this is that the pure software business doesn't exist anymore. It was a temporary historical phenomenon, centered around the 1980s, but nowadays people simply are not offering to pay money just for a disk with a program on it. (The few major exceptions are grandfathered in by network effects. If Microsoft Word were released today, nobody would buy it.)
People are still offering to pay money to have their problems solved; as you acknowledge yourself, this is a bullet you inevitably have to bite. You can think of this as having to be in the support business because that's what people are willing to pay for, or you can think of some other slant on it, but that's where you have to go because that's where the money is.
Or as one writer put it more succinctly: Software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.