The add on/enhancement business is always risky. As the author says,oin one hand it's kinda validating when it happens, otoh it obviously means you're going to

The add on/enhancement business is always risky. As the author says,oin one hand it's kinda validating when it happens, otoh it obviously means you're going to have to find a new "got to have tool" to hawk. There will never be a "sit back and watch the dollars roll in" in this space. Either the platform/ecosystem/standard offering eats you up OR everyone else smells the cash and moves in and the race to the bottom of profitablity begins. As an oldie, who remembers the kinds of money that was being made in the late 80s early 90s in software development tools? Cool languages. Powerful compilers. CASE tools. Libraries. Innovative IDEs. I worked in that space (Smalltalk VisualWorks). Businesses paid good money to fund those efforts, to try and have competitive advantage to develop better solutions than the competition. But in a similar vein, the OS vendors (as well as free open source) moved into this space, and then there was very little money to be made in 3rd party software development tools. So I feel these guys pain. But the expansion transcends the particular type of add in they're making money in.