The Software Paradox

Stephen O'Grady's The Software Paradox gives an excellent overview of the past half century of software, from the days when IBM gave away their operating system source code in the 50's through Microsoft's rise selling only software licenses through today's world where so much of software is freely available and nearly every product has an open source alternative. The paradox is that as software has become more and more important to our economy the profitablity of selling it has gone down markedly. O'Grady bears this out masterfully with economic overviews of the giants of the tech industry. Definitely worth a read!