Ask YC: When did we stop wanting useful software?

the issue is that "we" has been moving, fairly quickly, from the techies or business workers that used to primarily use the internet to, basically, everyone from soccer moms to preteens/teens to grandmas.

grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such. teenagers mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social.

there's still tons of people out there that need useful software, and useful software is a great cash cow. now that population, that niche that needs your software, while still probably sizable, no longer makes up a measurable segment of the internet.

i'm building an app that will be marketed to a group of maybe 50k-100k people. thats a negligible percentage of the internet-users at-large, but its still way more than enough to (hopefully someday) make me a nice income stream.

edited to add: social aspects of apps are how applications have been moving to monetize themselves while maintaining free-to-use cost. people need to return and view ads frequently for bills to be paid, if the users aren't dishing out the money themselves.

Right now everyone is talking about facebook, social software, and what have you. But most of these sites aren't making any money, and they never will. It's basically a really crowded market with no clear income model unless you're really big.

Find a niche that hasn't been exploited and create software that solves a problem in that niche. B2B is probably the best place to look - if you can come up with a piece of siftware that can either save a company money or make them money they will be happy to pay.

If you have ever seen SAP's implementations of ERP systems you will know that the B2B software out there is totally crap, and that it should be possible to come up with something better. And there are real companies willing to pay real money for your software.

There are plenty of people and companies and people that want and will pay for useful software, you just don't read about them on digg or reddit because they aren't sexy and cool.

The stuff making real money just has relatively very low visibility from the web. Most of these companies are small, private, and almost entirely owned by, like, three people. The founders come from industry and have zero interest in keeping a blog or writing articles relating their business experiences. Often they have legitimate industrial espionage concerns and prefer to keep a low profile except with regard to their handful of customers.

People who think really hard about facebook are living in an alternate reality that's distorted by spending so much time on the web.