I think this article is wrong for three reasons. Products can be successful without businesses being successful. Success is determined by meeting your own goa

I think this article is wrong for three reasons. Products can be successful without businesses being successful. Success is determined by meeting your own goals. Acquiring paying customers is a business success. A piece of software can be very popular and successful, even if there is no direct business correlation. Not everything can be easily correlated. Even 37signals own rails isn't being charged for in many situations. How much extra value has giving away rails done for 37signals? Giving some things away for free can be considered a marketing expense... an expense where you get to do what you like best - making software. If a painting doesn't sell for a lot of money, is it a successful painting? Seriously... there's lots of software bringing joy, and helping people do stuff - not all of it has to be making money. If the business plan is to make something cool, then eventually pay off the investment... then that's a success. Success is merely meeting of goals. So this company, has made something people like and use, and also give them money for. They are also on their path to paying back their investment, and gotten a lot of cred, press, and customers in the meantime. Software companies almost always make multiple products. So gaining a lot of customers with early products is a great way to bootstrap things. Then the software company can more easily sell stuff to their existing customers. They've met their own criteria for success and other peoples. So this article misses out on how a product can be a popular success without the business being a financial success. It also misses out on how, if they are meeting their goals they are a success. Finally it misses the business goal of acquiring customers who like what they do and pay them money... in their first product. In this case the New York Times has more of a leg to stand on than 37signals.