Wonder if they tried IncrediBuild to reduce their compile time? They are right that C++ - while faster than ever before - takes much longer to compile than many other languages.
Things like Incredibuild can only help so much. You still need to have a decent project structure, and enough computers to effectively cut down compile time.
Though (as mentioned in another comment) if your project is a big ball of inter dependencies then the link time will dominate.
I've seen compile times with Incredibuild that are less than a minute, but the link takes 5-10 minutes. Or better yet crashes due to the pdb size.
Many do sell software. Google is a major software provider. However, it is things like Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Education, for example. The famed buzzword: software as a service. More and more people are paying monthly for software. There's also a lot of software being sold to companies for their work - B2B rather than business to consumer.
As was famously said a few years ago "Software is eating the world."
Even traditional software companies with on-premise licensing rarely send CDs nowadays.
