[bsrkf]

Since this thread, rightfully so (and in full agreement), has people complain about the bloat of today's software stack, is it only me in thinking there may be sincere potential profit streams for high quality paid software?

I would happily pay for software that

  was high-quality
  was fast
  was privacy preserving
  had sane defaults
  had/provided reasonable support/insight
    (forum and developer blog)
  had a fair pricing models
    (non-subscription, x-years of updates etc)

as in

  an e-mail client
  an office suite
  a scheduler
    (scheduling learning, tasks, various deadlines, calendar, ...)
  photo/video editor
    (wouldn't need to be of the scope of a professional suite)
  a browser
    (earnestly, one that wasn't a mere chrome re-skin, wasn't run by a bloated paid by Google organization like Mozilla, and would take fingerprinting prevention and privacy seriously)
  ...

or am I underestimating the problem? How many full-time developers working how many hours, building on open-source software where sensible (as in you wouldn't hand-roll your own cryptography, networking protocol implementations, GUI libraries) would it take, for e.g. a good cross-compatible Desktop E-Mail Client? (there's little in terms of software that I hate more than Outlook)

And given competitive non-US, maybe even non EU-wages for such developers, how many 'customers' with fair pricing would such a company/startup need?

You could open-source part of your stack (as in singular libraries) for exposure and good will, could maybe offer free-tiered versions, potential fair pricing models could be similar to Sublime's https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text you could build upon technologies people are exited about and willing to take pay cuts for if that's what they could work in (Odin, Zig, Rust, ...) etc...

Even considering vendor lock in, market dominance of existing solutions, the dominance of smartphones over desktops, isn't there still a viable market? Maybe what's left is even more so, given Desktop use seems (besides gamers) consist (to a significant extent) of power users, semi-professionals/professionals & businesses?

And, even though this place here is of course a highly niche bubble, the plights of modern's software lack of quality are real and I'm sure felt beyond us.

[likium]

There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently had an email and calendar client.

And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better quality product.

[bsrkf]

Nowhere have I claimed that the whole product would need (nor should) be fully open source and why wouldn't non-US wages help?

Assuming it takes me X-amount of software engineering hours to produce an alpha version of a given product and now let's imagine a rented office space plus four developers; consider renting in a major US city, and paying competitive US-major-city-wages versus doing so in a significantly smaller city in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia).

In both cases you could develop an English-Language version of your product for global use and you can distribute software cheaply over the internet; you'd still charge customers in the US US-prices, yet would have saved on development costs.

I'm sure this comes with its own set of difficulties, especially regarding US business customers, but initially it could be an advantage in certain scenarios.

There also seems to be a current push towards non-US (sometimes even specifically from-EU) products in tech, which might give one an interesting market position, albeit I'm lacking details here, and it's yet to pan out how viable this trend is long-term of course.