Charles Hudson On Software

Charles Hudson (of In-Q-Tel) describes very nicely in a recent post how and why software is increasingly moving from being sold as shrink-wrap to a service.

The services or ASP model is unfairly maligned because of a number of unsuccessful attempts at it during the late 90's. Those failures had more to do with the product than the model. I think the most important point Charles makes is that we don't even tend to realize that many of the services we use today (PayPal, Yahoo) are really just hosted software.