Sales is and will always be important, but you forget that:<p>a) Entry level sales jobs can be soul destroying.<p>b) Selling something you have trouble believing in is really hard.<p>c) Sales isn't a monolithic field.  For instance, compare, selling new cars and high-end legal services; they are fundamentally different tasks requiring different skillsets.<p>Hence, you could quit programming and go and get an entry level sales job, stuff it up and end up hating sales and being in a worse position to start a business and make reasonable money.<p>On the other hand, if you build something that you believe in and think is fantastic it will be much easier for you to sell it.  This has two additional advantages:<p>a) Believing in what you're selling will make it easier for you to get over rejection, and<p>b) If what you've built isn't what the marketplace wants then you have the advantage of both direct contact with your market and the ability to directly alter your product so that it's something they'd like.<p>Finally it's easier to hire good sales people as a programmer than vice versa because sales performance is easily measured.