Glenn Reynolds has a new column about niche software that he buys from a Polish software company. Reynolds is part owner of a small recording studio, and uses software from PSP Audio that simulates some of the warmer features of analog recording gear.
Reynolds larger point is that two guys in Poland can create this sort of business largely due to the Internet. The software is too specialized for big companies to produce something like it, but with low distribution costs — customers download the software from the company’s web site — PSP Audio has flourished with a minimal capital investment. Reynolds writes,
This is a mode of doing business that would have been impossible until the past decade, and it’s one that’s wonderfully suited to countries like Poland (and India) that have lots of smart people but a shortage of investment capital and mediocre infrastructure. I’m sure that shipping the software, on disks, from Poland to the rest of the world would be a much bigger headache, and produce far fewere sales, but INternet downloads solve these problems.
What’s news about this is that it isn’t news. Ten years ago, or even five, the notion of quality software from Poland would have been a joke to most people, and the idea of selling it to cusomters over the Internet would have seemed equally farfetched. Yet now such ventures are commonplace.
My favorite example of this is a piece of software I bought a couple months ago called Weather Master. This has to be a niche market’s niche market. This is a program for generating realistic weather in fantasy worlds, geared primarily to people who play role playing games and are so geeky that they have to have average precipitation levels for their game worlds.
And the program is awesome. I’ll post a full review sometime, but not only does it support all sorts of bizarre worlds (have a world with a 72 hour day? Piece of cake!), but one its set up it can output all weather to a searchable database. Click a button and SHAZAM — you’ve got a file with weather for your fantasy planet for a 50 year period.
I doubt the programmers behind this will get rich off this product as it is, and without the Internet this product probably never exists. Ah, progress.