For decades, software was expensive because software was difficult to build.
A serious business application required programmers, designers, database engineers, system administrators, QA teams, project managers, security specialists and months — sometimes years — of development.
That reality created some of the largest and most profitable companies in history.
Microsoft could sell Office to hundreds of millions of users. Adobe could build an empire around creative software. Salesforce, Oracle and SAP could charge companies enormous recurring licensing fees for systems that would have been prohibitively expensive for most businesses to reproduce themselves.
Software had extraordinary margins because creating a serious alternative was extraordinarily expensive.
