Just my 2c worth regarding Does slow growth equals slow death?
I vaguely remember a keynote by Geoffrey A. Moore at JavaOne 1997 or 1998 talking about platform and application businesses. In this talk, he was making the point that the market for software platforms is traditionally divided basically into 80% marketshare for one vendor and the rest of the vendors share the remaining 20%, whereas application software markets are more like two or three rather large vendors, let’s say 40%, 30%, 20% and the rest of the players are small niche players.
Although a bug tracking system may sport a healthy third-party plug-in business, bug-tracking is essentially application software, not platform software like operating systems or databases.
Disclaimer: I may have gotten the percentages wrong, but you get the point.