Market friction currently makes selling software a viable business model. The past and the present The traditional way to deal with this is to lock ideas up inside people, places, and things. I have to go to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum to see old Georgia's paintings, because they don't allow photography. Then they can charge me admission. A book can be sold for more than the cost of printing it because the ideas are difficult to separate from their physical manifestation.
Software makes it much easier to separate ideas from people, places, and things.
If I buy my computer to send email with, and I want to make fractals, I don't have to buy a new fractal machine. I just have to download some fractal software. This is a spectacular change. And it was the nature of computer applications, in general, until recently. But now we have the Web, and people are talking a lot about application-specific embedded computers.