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This is why there were no new software startups of any significance launched between 1995 (when web browsers made piracy trivial) and 2006 (when Salesforce.com launched the first modern SaaS business).

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To the downvoter(s): I'm genuinely curious, can you name any significant software companies that launched during that era? I've not done an exhaustive search, but I've looked for them and have had a much harder time finding software companies with launch dates of 1996-2005 than <1995 or >2006 (the successful launch count in that window obviously wasn't zero but I'm pretty sure it's down significantly from the before and after eras).

Valve, Rockstar Games, PopCap?

Valve launched as a boxed-software company but quickly pivoted to being a server-based digital distribution company. Rockstar made most of their money in the console market where piracy rates remained far lower than the general PC market, precisely because the console manufacturers invested billions in custom hardware to try to keep the boxed-software business model viable there in ways it wasn't in the PC arena. And yeah, PopCap did incredibly well as a boxed-software/downloadable-software business but given the insane number of game studios that launched and died in that era (I spent ~10 years working in the game industry), I don't find a handful of game companies that did make it a convincing argument that the boxed-software business model survived unscathed after 1995. Pretty much everybody else was either going out of business or scrambling to turn themselves into server-based business models.

> To the downvoter(s): I'm genuinely curious, can you name any significant software companies that launched during that era? I've not done an exhaustive search, but I've looked for them and have had a much harder time finding software companies with launch dates of 1996-2005

Have you heard of Google or Facebook's origins? They were both in that window and pretty significant. Valve, LinkedIn and Netflix have also done okay...

Thanks these are great names to fold into the mix Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn are great tech companies but their presence on the list actually supports the idea that traditional software companies had a hard time launching during that window as two of them are server-based subscription products and the third is a server-based advertising product. Valve's a bit more complicated, largely because GabeN is a genius, but I think it's fair to say that their pivot from game company business model to server-based distribution company further backs up the argument that 1995 marks the end of the old school boxed-software/downloadable-software business model.

Google.

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