Consumers pay for software all the time - games, outlook/office, dropbox, phone apps. (And if you put netflix on the list, then tons of content such as ebooks,

Consumers pay for software all the time - games, outlook/office, dropbox, phone apps. (And if you put netflix on the list, then tons of content such as ebooks, music, paywalls and such are bought all the time) We tend to dismiss these because they aren't bigshot modern startups. Consumers don't buy alot of services, since frankly most have good free alternatives, but they buy software that sits on their hardware and they buy content.