2) I have two people that have been programming with me for about six years now. We created a tool for building business applications on the web. In some ways its very much like Microsoft Access for the web. Its crazy good now, we're on something like version 10. We use it for most of our clients as a supplement to MS Access.

Unfortunately, at this time, it only works with PostgreSQL and every time we show it to PostgreSQL people they love it but want it to be open source. Obviously, we had hoped to sell it so that's a big disappointment.

We have an address book and a calendar. We're mulling over writing a webmail client and offering it as a "small business server" since Microsoft seems to have stepped away from that. I'd rather not do the work unless there is demand. How do I test that?

-- So we have no shortage of choices. We could do a hundred different things at this point. The tool we built is phenomenal and would allow us to build any number of things quickly but out of all our choices we don't know what is likely to be profitable as a product. All we know for sure is we don't want to consult anymore because its a dead end.

I'd like to productize what I do but I don't see how. The aerospace and medical companies I deal with don't do cloud and seem unlikely to pay me for maintaining a server in their building. Making a profit on servers is a dead end since they are hard to sell. How do these Micro$oft guys come in and bill $25k every three years like clockwork?