Simply put, back then there weren't enough eye balls looking at websites. Now, more than 10 years later, you see people use the web nearly nonstop. Back then they were right when they said "The Internet is going to change the world", but they got a bit too ahead of themselves. But maybe that's what it took to get to where we are today.
You've got that right. Look at all that changed in 15 years in terms of what it took to garner $43,000 in revenue compared to doing the same now. An independent developer can, in less than the time it took Dr Koop to hit that number, hit the same number with 1/1000th (if not 1/10,000th) of the capital outlay (their $8 million in money), and nary a Microsoft product in sight. Between fifteen years of open source, competition for infrastructure and platform as a service, multiple revenue channels available to individuals and several orders of magnitude more eyeballs and attention spent on the internet, we can all party like it's 1997.
Yeah the game evolved quite a bit. Heck if a independent developer has a bit of a following and puts out an insanely great product, he can make more than double that revenue over night.
Great point. Today with a $50 virtual server or equivalent, little to no marketing (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon et al. will take care of that), and Google Adsense you can hit $43k a year in sales with not too much trouble.
