guerby: I'm in Australia, and I don't know a single person who works on shrinked-wrap software. I'd say 70% of the programmers I know here work on internal IT projects(1), and the rest work on applications sold to and customized for other businesses. I don't know a single programmer who works on an application which is aimed at the home user or even small business market.
Going by some online discussions, I suspect that it must be very different in the 'States. For instance, once on K5 I was discussing Java programming, and I said a large proportion of software for business is written in Java. People thought I was talking about MS Office type software, which I hadn't even considered(2).
(1) This includes a lot of outsourcing, where a company
hires an IT consulting company to come and write something
for them.
(2)Perhaps that was my fault for not explaining myself
better, but I honestly hadn't even considered that when I
said Java software for business people would think of
Office type software.