Perhaps I can raise a hypothesis about one possible future
business model.
For every software there will be two groups of users:
Those who will pay, and those who will not. Let's call
the first group the "preferred" users and the others -
"the public".
The preferred users will be a group of people or
corporations who need the software very much and want
to take an active role in its design, so that it will suit
their needs very closely. They will also receive it slightly
before the others for beta testing. Most of those willing to
pay will probably be corporations, not individuals, and
they will form some kind of "consortium" that will define
what the software should look like (e.g., "What features would
we like to have in Acrobat 7.0?"). The software company
will simply work as a coordinator and service-provider
for the consortium, doing the actual development and
coding. All coordination could be done through the internet,
including the formation of the consortium itself. The members
of the consortium will have to decide how to divide the costs
of the development among themselves, but after the software
is released, it would be free for the public to use.
Naturally, the process will be open for every hacker or
expert to express their opinion during the design and testing.
The key idea is just that the potential users will be the
ones who will actually define the specifications, not
the software vendor.