Jeff Duntemann, l’autore del primo libro di programmazione che ho letto nella mia vita, quello sul Borland Pascal (per dovere di cronaca in realtà il primo che ho acquistato era sul C++), nel 1998 ha scritto sul suo blog questo post che cito per intero:
We’re getting to the day where almost any software application or utility you could describe is out there somewhere—in many cases freely downloadable from half a dozen places. A friend of mine is putting together a small conference for independent Catholic priests and bishops, and wanted to know if I’d seen any software for managing conference, attendees, fees, schedules and stuff. Sure as..er..heck, I found a package in about ten minutes. I mentioned in VDM that I’d like to have a software gizmo that magnified the cursor region so I could bulls-eye the mouse pointer into those teeny little Explorer interface plus/minus boxes. Sunuvugun, four or five such things already exist. When there were fewer things in the world, word-of-mouth was easy. Now there are a near-infinite number of things in the world, and no one has the breadth of attention to be able to snag word-of-mouth on more than a tiny fraction of it. I’m quite sure that managing word of mouth is the key to making money with software distributed on the Web. Many people say they know how to do this. I’ve seen no evidence that anyone does. I think about it a lot, and if I come up with any useful idea you’ll see them here.