ABSTRACT
With the advent of the Cloud, the software industry started changing. Traditional business models, whereby a particular version of a computer application would be bought by customers, who would then use that software for as long as they needed (or until a new version was released that they’d pay again to upgrade to), seem to make less sense in an era where software can be updated more regularly, with automatic updates made available via the Internet. Sticking to this business model meant holding big, new features back until some arbitrary time where they could be packaged up and sold as a new version. Th e timing of such releases could be problematic too-wait too long and risk customers switching to more feature-rich products, but publishing new paid upgrades too regularly risks losing customers who feel they are being nickel-and-dimed. Coupled with this, the natural evolution of a great many software products was to integrate them with Cloud Services to some extent, and a general desire to make applications “platformindependent” (de-emphasising a need to run the application on Windows XP,
for example, and instead making it available for users with smartphones, or operating systems such as Mac OS X or Linux) meant that making the software run on a hosted server instead, with users accessing it via a browser became a very attractive prospect.
