I picked up a link to this artcle over at the Customer Evangelists blog. Its about some people in the recording industry suggesting that content sharing could  actually be good, and that there is a business model there – go and read it now.

The whole thing makes me think about future models for product sales in the software industry. Apart from a few staple applications (and perhaps even them) I tend to use smallish pieces of software like my blog posting client, or Shrinklet or WinZip or Skype.

Now, just imagine if the concept of programs and data merged. So if I e-mailed someone a ZIP file and they opened it up - they would suddenly have WinZip on their machine.

They could use it to work with the data I sent them, but if they wanted to create their own zip files then the application framework that supports it would allow them to input their credit card details (or alternatively communicate to an enterprise licensing server – software that isn’t registered on the licensing server just doesn’t run).

I wonder if there is a business model there somewhere.