Metamorphosis

The rapidly changing IT world in which we find ourselves is one where “traditional” thoughts about who is what are being challenged on a regular basis (as an aside, it still tickles me that we have concepts of “traditional” anything in IT, but there you go…).
By way of example: Microsoft regards people who use our products to produce software products as a key segment of our customer base, known as ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). Traditionally, they would have used our software development products (Visual Studio) to develop some software that would run on one or many of our platforms (Windows, Windows Server, SQL and so on) to then sell that software on as a licenced product to their own customers.
However, in a world where software becomes service, the software company now starts to manage and host that software on behalf of the client, turning a perpetual licence into a timebound subscription.
Which poses an interesting question – do companies that we have traditionally regarded as “end users” of some description now become ISVs if they are developing software which is exposed as some sort of service to their end customer? What will, in the future, be the boundaries of what are regarded as software companies? Is someone like, say Ocado, a software company in the services world?
It kind of makes my head hurt, thinking about it…