But todays best business software cant be pirated.
You cant torrent Slack, pirate Salesforce, crack Notion to give you more features for free.
Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
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The best new business software todayasksyou to share.
The more people using it, the better, even if everyone doesnt pay.
Sharewarethe business model behind the earliest indie viral softwarebecame the default business model.
[Read:Hiring software engineers?
To this day theres a notice on WinZips website: There is no free version of WinZip.
Yet perhaps that was the very reason we remember WinZip today.
WinZip became the default tool to zip files because it was freely accessible to paid customers and sharers alike.
Distribution was the original challenge in selling software.
Early computer users figured it out on their own.
Theyd try software on a computer, like it, then copy it to their machine.
Its both how the earliest software spread, and how the open-source movement got started.
But there was no Stripe, no PayPal, no App Store to distribute and charge for software.
There were only mail-order catalogues and big box stores.
Thus GatesOpen Letter to Hobbyistswith its call to pay for software.
Just write to me.
Sharing is caring
Gates wasnt suggesting shareware, directly, but the groundwork was there.
Six years later, database software developer Jim Knopf used that as his business model.
I decided to place a message in the program,wrote Knopfof his PC-File app.
I would ask those who received it to voluntarily send a modest donation to help defray my costs.
PC-Talk (almost an early FTP app) developer Andrew Fluegelman had added a similar request to his program.
Then Microsoft developer Bob Wallace called his PC-Write word processorshareware, with the same share-then-pay-when-you-like business model.
And within a few years, that was the default model for new indie software.
These new developers werent purely altruistic, developing free software for the greater good.
They instead realized that copying gave their software free marketing.
Sharing as the new default
Sharing software installers was one thing.
How about sharing the entire program in a click, no install or shareware payment needed?
When the web matured enough to become an program platform in the early 2000s, thats what started happening.
Then it was Google Docs, a free online word processor with a prominentSharebutton in the top right corner.
You didnt need to share Word documents, and hope your colleague had Word installed on their computer.
You were sharing your fileandthe software to view it in a click.
And then sharing was everywhere.
We went from software that ran on a single machine with software that ran everywhere.
Software scarcity turned into software abundance.
You dont even need to think about the software most of the time.
You quit sharing files, and started sharing the entire software experience.
Sharing went from a discouraged behavior to the default way we work.
Free is not a magic bullet, wrote former Wired editor Chris Anderson in his bookFree.
Sharing gets the reputation and attention.
Subscriptions get the cash.
And limited time, metered billing lets everyone pay what fits their needs.
Thusthe best SaaS doesnt lock you in, doesnt make you pay from the start.
Subscriptions make that possible.
So it’s possible for you to pay per project.
Just pay for this month.
Want to make a website for a hackathon, but not keep it around forever?
Spin up a DigitalOcean droplet for the days you need it, and only pay for those days.
Micropayments can work, it turns out.
Today, you could use whatever software you want, whenever you want it.
Illustrator for this project, Figma for the next, or both for one month if you want.
Shareware got more people to use the software than needed to pay for it.
Subscriptions get more people to pay since theres no other way to get the software.
And the best SaaS today lets everyone pay what fits their needs.
Each made software accessible to a far wider range of people, and opened up new use cases.
Software is, truly, something to share.
