You really gotta walk back that excessive, exuberant, irrational optimism, Sparky.

Well, there are incubators that support some shiny new thing, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram but they tend to Do One Little Thing Well, a la Unix, and then sell their soul for rock-n-roll.
But we think about IT here. There are also business in the Real World http://www.groundedcoffeeshop.com/ but both of these examples underscore your broader point, if I may radically restate it: economic activity of consequence is a top-down, not a bottom-up affair these days.

I'm willing to commit to a definite maybe.
BHO owns a substantial chunk of his woes, but it's not an open-and-shut case that we'd've gotten into reform mode in the counterfactual case of a GOP administration.

Unlikely to be an equal revenue stream.

The cost would seem proportional to the users.
As far as running the business, just let me sharpen my AWS knives a little more. . .
Of course, in our post-capitalistic era, just having a good business plan is necessary but insufficient to protect you from Big Oligarchy and Big Government, assuming you could pry them apart with a crowbar. If you offer a viable alternative, look for "something really, really unfortunate" to arrive with an innocuous name like "Net Neutrality", or something.

So, how much are we willing to pay as a subscription to make up the lost revenue?
Or do we just expect the vendor to eat the opportunity cost?

Yeah, your sig is a hoot.

I know, right? You're the only authentic one here, and the rest of us wander in circles.

Why the hell are people still planting almonds in California ? 1.1 gallons of water to grow 1 nut FFS!

Given that I also wrote much of the init.c in FreeBSD, you probably failed to fix that for me. :p

Actually, that one did. It resulted in both "Gulf War Syndrome", and a pretty big scandal where Monsanto brokered the deal to sell the machines to manufacture chemical weapons to them from a German company, said deal routed through France. But nice try.

PS: Plus we sold them the Sarin the used against their Kurdish separatists directly, so we knew they had it at one time, and were just hoping they hadn't used it all up so we could say "Aha! Stockpiles!".

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/04/17/boing-boing-meets-the-mob/

I'm sure you understand much more, yet strike an ignorant pose. Tiresome.

Your nostalgic 1A notions are totally going to get you sent to Room 101, mister.

"It will produce 50 million gallons of water per day and will provide 7% of the potable water needs for the San Diego region."

Cool. Now you only need to build another 14 of them to satisfy the water needs of the area...