alt Hacker News"hit driven" in the business model sense.
The movie studio business model depends on putting out a whole lot of stuff and having a few big hits earn enough to cover the losses from the flops.
Now that software is basically "dollars in, software out", companies will probably put out a lot more software. Similar to movie studios, most of this software will not hit, but the few things that do hit can earn back the costs of the things that do not.
I don't know. I still think you're looking at this from the consumer side exactly the way they want you to.
In business, some of the most reliable returns come from predicting when the wheels fall off and riding that sucker until the bitter end. The "hits" don't matter anymore to that kind of business. The area under that tail part of the curve can be much larger than the area under the earlier peaks when consumers were most enthusiastic.