I'm serious. The market changed. You can no longer sell a C compiler, a desktop operating system or an e-mail client. You can sell a lot of stuff.
And don't call me Shirley.
The bad news is that small companies cannot do that easily - they typically rely on a single product/service that they need to charge people for, like any traditional business out there.
Same with app stores - they are pretty much forcing 3rd party devs to give away or sell for pennies. Sure, we get this occasional story of a successful mobile product, but the truth is for each success there are tens of thousands of apps making close to nothing.
This, for me, is NOT a good trend for software startups. The whole "free" movement make it exceedingly hard to sell software nowadays.
Surely ye jest.
There's more startups charging consumers now than anytime I can remember. It used to be that unless your startup was retail based, it was free. Those days are gone.