[HN Gopher] Consumer software is expected to be next fast-growin...
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Consumer software is expected to be next fast-growing segment
(1994)
Author : 1970-01-01
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-07-21 13:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.csmonitor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.csmonitor.com)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Honestly this model of selling the consumer software in exchange
| for money that runs on their computer seems better than providing
| the software that only runs on the company's servers in exchange
| for data and ads.
| haunter wrote:
| Aren't most video games still following this rule?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Given the rise of free-to-play-pay-to-win games,
| microtransactions and DLCs, no.
| zer8k wrote:
| I agree. SaaS was supposed to be a model that was highly
| beneficial for vendors selling to corporations. Once it
| penetrated the consumer market it became death by 1,000 cuts.
| Now everyone's life is loaded down subscriptions for things
| that 20 years ago would've been bought once. I miss the days of
| owning software. I guess I can be thankful it pushed me towards
| open source.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye. On my phone I used some half-bad text editor, Acode, to
| view a patch I meeded to review on the fly. It shows ads and
| does an ad popup when you try to exit.
|
| Like, Google does not let you search their app store and
| filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good
| utility tool without knowing its exact name.
|
| A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give
| some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
| mfashby wrote:
| Try f droid store, all the apps there are required to be
| open source so there's fewer spy/malware. Or look for apps
| by secuso on the play store. Fwiw acode on f-droid doesn't
| seem to have ads.
|
| I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple
| stuff.
| heattemp99 wrote:
| Saas is also a way of combating piracy imo.
| zer8k wrote:
| It also greatly exacerbates piracy. I'd be willing to bet
| movies, music, and certain software like CAD are seeing
| unprecedented levels of piracy after SaaS. Especially when
| SaaS enables companies like Netflix to betray their
| consumers.
| sbuk wrote:
| Professional-level 'CAD' has _always_ been susceptible to
| piracy as it has always been criminally expensive. Music
| services are at about the right price, and if anything
| offer pretty good value when one considers that album
| prices were reaching the $20 mark.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It is, with the downside that if the company goes out of
| business, the buyer is out of luck. See, e.g. VanMoof
| antupis wrote:
| Saas in hardware is kinda stupid if you cannot offer some
| real benefits eg game pass.
| 0max wrote:
| Playstation Plus with the streaming package really
| changed my view on gaming once I got fiber optic piped
| into my building. The hardware fan doesn't spin up when I
| stream Ghosts of Tsushima instead of playing locally,
| essentially turning my PS4 into a thin client for Sony's
| services.
|
| RIP Gamestop
| carlosjobim wrote:
| At least on Apple systems, I have always found paid good apps
| at fair prices for all my needs.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Maybe with Gen AI potentially lowering the cost of software
| development, it will be economically viable to go back to the
| "pay once and own" model...
| xp84 wrote:
| I don't really care where it runs, or if it's one-time purchase
| vs subscription. It's just the "paying indirectly for 'free'
| software products" vs "paying for software" that I care about.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| ...in exchange for data and ads, and money.
|
| That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the
| vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are
| only two ways out of this:
|
| 1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some
| reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a
| product for sale, rather than service for rent.
|
| 2. Regulation.
|
| Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and
| forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other
| hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently
| massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and
| whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the
| whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| The third way out is to simply not participate. If something
| is SaaS only I pretend it doesn't exist.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can
| extract more value out of you_
|
| It was also a solution to the problem of updates. You can't
| pay for continuous improvement with a traditional software
| product.
| zer8k wrote:
| I never had problem paying a company for patches.
|
| The problem companies had would be someone buying their
| software and then never buying updates. That's a product
| problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer
| captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the
| customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of
| the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is
| still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well
| to SV shareholders.
|
| It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy
| assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had
| to be made right the first time when released on CD.
| Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually
| major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda
| made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but
| this is by-and-large not the case.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I never had problem paying a company for patches_
|
| But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are
| transaction costs. As is downloading and installing
| software, something software running on a server and
| delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those
| ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription
| revenue.
|
| > _Software had to be made right the first time when
| released on CD_
|
| But it never was. Particularly in a networked world.
| Perfect is the enemy of good.
|
| SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be
| written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for
| that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| > But you had to decide to pay. Many did not.
|
| Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The
| false belief you seem to rely on here is that if
| companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be
| compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue
| anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in
| fact stop completely working on updates, except to match
| competitors, when their products get popular. But even
| that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file
| format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
| zer8k wrote:
| I can tell you having worked at a majority SaaS-type of
| companies my entire career the amount of "updates" we put
| out is as frequent, or less, than the previous model.
| Despite working in the industry (it's impossible to avoid
| as you likely know) I encourage nearly _everyone_ I know
| to find other options before paying for software
| subscriptions.
|
| It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking
| away ownership from people in order to be able to drive
| up profits. Consider how normal software sales works.
| It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to
| a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up
| and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a
| zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer.
| I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of
| "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase
| of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no
| ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over
| time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being
| priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the
| gym model.
|
| The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You
| pay a subscription and at the end of that term you _own_
| that version of the software _permanently_. You may
| continue to pay (because you find the product valuable)
| but you are not required to. At the end, you still _own_
| what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very
| little value to people for what they pay.
|
| An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of
| AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse
| Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker
| and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid
| for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time
| period. That type of capture is called theft in other
| modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for
| all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the
| price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the
| can _extort_ (not capitalize) on the moat they have.
|
| One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one
| of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an
| unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-
| consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what
| "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking
| down on this.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's about money. It's not about updates. _
|
| It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends
| towards when designing any system. Often times, that
| aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's
| orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in
| every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| As a counterpoint, subscription means you pay even if the
| updates are subpar. So in fact subscription encourages lack
| of updates. Would you work hard if your boss can't fire
| you?
|
| With the traditional system the vendor has to work hard to
| put up an update that's worth it, and then you pay for it.
|
| Adobe were clearly struggling to provide good updates to
| their software for years, creators were always kidding they
| just keep tweaking the UI skin because they're out of
| ideas, so there's no point buying the new updates. So when
| Adobe went subscription-only, they did it under the
| pretense they'll be able to ship new exciting features
| every month. And of course... in retrospect they didn't. In
| fact their updates are even more minor than before.
| zuppy wrote:
| how is that a problem for the consumer? just provide paid
| updates for the next major version. who wants it, pays for
| it.
|
| i give the example of Path Finder, which is a Finder
| replacement for mac. there's not much to improve there,
| after a while it became bloated. they went with
| subscriptions after many years of owning the software (and
| rolled back that later with an alternative after the
| backslash).
|
| i don't use anything that came in the last few years,
| except the compatibility with the latest os. maybe it's
| time to stop this madness and try to make every software do
| anything and extract money from the consumer for things
| that are really not needed (yes, i understand this is my
| opinion but i bet you all have a similar example).
| zer8k wrote:
| > maybe it's time to stop this madness and try to make
| every software do anything and extract money from the
| consumer for things that are really not needed
|
| Or put on your entrepreneur cap and realize this is an
| opportunity.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| It's not, because if you try to fight an empire that has
| billions under its belt, you'll find out you can't
| compete. They're lazy when not provoked, but can get
| vicious when you show up.
|
| It's kind of like a lion. Sleeps most of the time. But
| don't get in its way.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| If you cannot convince people to buy v2, then clearly the
| updates aren't worth the cost of making them.
|
| Except for security upgrades, I feel like most software
| rapidly hits a point where the upgrades aren't worth it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| This model still exists, somewhat. One factor that worked
| against it, from the standpoint of the software companies, was
| that there was no effective way to prevent copying and sharing
| (aka 'piracy'). Software companies put a lot of money and
| effort into trying to stop it, but every technical scheme was
| eventually cracked. The elaborate schemes that involved having
| a physical copy of the game's packaging annoyed users. Some
| schemes were downright abusive[1].
|
| Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to
| completely lock down software installed on a device under the
| control of the user puts some companies off.
|
| So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's
| attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if
| the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you,
| VanMoof).
|
| 1
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloa...
| flangola7 wrote:
| I don't want companies to be able to lock down a user's
| device. That isn't a business model that should be
| legitimized or allowed.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > I don't want companies to be able to lock down a user's
| device
|
| Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software
| is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the
| electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to
| reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change
| performance parameters, replace things that break. When my
| dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new
| carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all
| physical parts. It's different today.
| ghaff wrote:
| Also, if you wanted on-prem software, open source
| alternatives increasingly became an option. (As in the case
| of office suites, SaaS also allows for some collaboration and
| other options that couldn't really be done with desktop
| software installs. I never want to go back to mailing around
| copies of files and merging changes again.
| samsquire wrote:
| From the 2000s onwards (given my age) I remember permanent
| licenced software being very expensive and out of reach:
| Photoshop, Visual Studio, Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic.
|
| > ``You're going to see an economic model where software
| companies become giant incubators for good ideas,'' he says,
| likening it to the record business, which takes the creative
| product of an artist and markets it.
|
| I feel the big tech companies should be expanding into many
| markets by their sheer programming prowess and complexity
| budgets/capacity. They should try run the cost of complexity to
| zero and make complexity a commodity.
|
| Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see much new desktop software.
|
| I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for
| digital things. PS10 for an iOS APP???
|
| What software am I actually willing to pay for? Probably software
| that earns me something. I bought Sublime Text a long time ago
| but nowadays I just use notepad++ or IntelliJ or VS Code rarely.
| I bought Typora, a markdown editor because I write a lot of
| markdown.
|
| The same problem also applies to the web. What websites would you
| pay for?
|
| Would you pay $3 for a HN subscription? What about digital
| magazines? Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it,
| that enhance your life?
|
| EDIT: it just occurred to me that the web IS a digital magazine.
| But I meant publications.
|
| I feel if you want something to stay around then the market has
| to support its costs at a bare minimum. If you only charge
| lifetime licences/permanent licences traditional software then
| the software has a lifespan because the company can only support
| it while their costs are covered. SaaS is the outcome of web
| technology, browser technology and business needs.
|
| I just don't like the duplication of effort, every SaaS has to
| implement authorisation and authentication, backup, security
| measures, billing, subscriptions, user management, account
| management, an Android app, an iOS app, dashboards and maybe a
| desktop client. It's such a waste of effort.
|
| What about a SaaS dashboard SaaS, where all your SaaS are mangaed
| from one place?
|
| Edit: Saas As Code?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > PS10 for an iOS APP???
|
| PS10 is outrageous when AAA video games start at $70.
|
| > Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that
| enhance your life?
|
| New Yorker, Economist, The Atlantic, NYT are all fantastic- I
| order print editions and don't install their apps on my phone.
| mch82 wrote:
| Core services like identity, subscription management, payment,
| and backup seem to be emerging as the role of the operating
| system on modern devices.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for
| digital things. PS10 for an iOS APP???
|
| It very much seems like developers have stopped trying. The app
| store for the iPhone/iPad is broken and I blame in-app
| purchases and subscriptions. I feel that Apple should be VERY
| restrictive about what is allowed to be an in-app purchase or
| subscription.
|
| Try browsing the apps available, especially for children, it's
| all free, with in app purchases or in-app subscriptions. I was
| trying to find a coloring app on the iPad, there's like one
| that's reasonably priced. It's free for 5 - 10 coloring pages
| then you pay $5 - $6 to unlock everything. Completely
| reasonable in my mind. The rest: $30 per year as a
| subscription... well, now I'm not buying anything, that's not
| something that should be a subscription.
|
| I really want the app stores to start very clearly advertising
| that the in-app purchase is an unreasonably priced subscription
| and preferably require that the price to unlock an every
| feature. Most of all I want in-app purchase and subscriptions
| to go away.
|
| My life already have plenty of subscriptions, I refuse to sign
| up for more. I have four streaming subscriptions, two news
| sites, online storage, password managers, internet, phones,
| service contracts for my car... Just F-ing stop and let me pay
| up front for things that REALLY doesn't need to be
| subscriptions because I can't deal with anymore.
| Kye wrote:
| Procreate (one time purchase) + pictures of real coloring
| books might work. You can also get PDF coloring books and
| load them as layers. As far as I know Procreate has nothing
| in it that should cause problems. It can access the file
| browser, but that might be controllable in parental control
| settings.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have not searched for a single app outside of Apple Arcade
| in many years.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| For those who weren't alive at the time it's probably hard to
| understand what an inflection point Windows 95 was.
|
| Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and
| what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed.
|
| The software business went from primarily being targeted at
| businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at
| mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a
| brand name with people who have literally never purchased
| anything in this class before.
|
| It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my
| life with the adoption of the internet being second and the
| adoption of mobile phones being third.
|
| It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those
| shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of
| progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do
| wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95,
| the internet, and the iPhone.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Or, how hard it is to predict future markets. I remember when I
| started making games (on CD-ROMS!) and I met a guy who had a
| "multimedia" company. It sounds so funny now. He felt that soon
| their would be huge stores, like record stores(!) that had
| aisles and aisles of CD-ROMs for every need and interest. It
| didn't sound unreasonable at the time. And now I can't even
| explain to my kids what record store were like when I was a
| kid.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Windows 95 was years behind the state-of-the-art on the day
| "Chicago" shipped. The technical choice of the backslash for
| file system paths, and hiding the real disk contents from the
| user view, caused years of headaches. The architectural design
| choices for extensibility ended up as a swiss-cheese
| architecture for malware. MSFT-chairman literally saw himself
| as the new savior. glad you see this as important?
| petemill wrote:
| Important in terms of adoption.
| function_seven wrote:
| None of your assessment matters regarding how big a deal it
| actually was. My mom didn't give a damn about backslashes and
| my dad had zero use for seeing hidden files. The "state of
| the art" in 1995 was for nerds doing nerd stuff, Windows 95
| was for regular people who couldn't afford a Macintosh.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| I fail to see how a minor choice such as what character to
| use as path separator has to do with being state of the art.
|
| https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-
| bac... does a deep dive into the reasons for the choice,
| which seems more to do with backwards compatibility with DOS
| 1.0.
|
| Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And
| when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web
| wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access
| was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be
| Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to
| fight against AOL).
|
| If you don't have internet access, where is your malware
| coming from?
|
| Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers.
|
| Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few
| times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed
| when your box is ON the internet.
|
| Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly
| concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's
| why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.
| hackzzz wrote:
| [flagged]
| axpy906 wrote:
| I think AI finally is at point where it is. It's peak hype
| right now but there is definitely a difference between
| knowledge workers that use it and one's that don't. It's only
| going to grow wider in the coming years.
| packetlost wrote:
| > there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers
| that use it and one's that don't
|
| [citation needed]
|
| I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out
| of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing
| code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-
| useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored
| search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives
| into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing
| major benefits?
| kimixa wrote:
| We've also done some initial experiments, and seen no
| improvements in productivity, and the comments from the
| people using it were rather negative.
|
| Maybe it's sector dependent? Maybe systems programming
| doesn't have enough reference materials for them to learn
| from?
|
| Certainly not the "Clearly obvious difference" some people
| seem to be claiming to see in some places online.
| packetlost wrote:
| The latency is distracting for me tbh. That's something I
| think could be fixed by running local models, but the
| quality of output is just not there.
|
| Maybe if you're slinging HTML and JS all day it helps
| more
| ben_w wrote:
| My experiments with 3.5 say that it does the easy 80%
| solution that takes 20% of my time.
|
| The advantage, that actually is a game changer[0], is
| that it can do languages I can't. I'm an iOS dev, I've
| _technically_ been paid to write JavaScript at various
| points, but the best of that was about 20 years ago and
| just before jQuery got popular.
|
| ChatGPT lets me turn my ideas for JavaScript projects
| into things that _almost_ work and are usually close
| enough for me to fix -- turning me from an iOS dev into a
| JS project manager.
|
| Likewise Stable Diffusion: I've done some game artwork
| when I tried self employed for a bit, SD can act like a
| mostly amazing artist that does a few bits (mostly hands)
| like it was temporarily high on LSD, and I can just
| highlight those messed up regions and say "do again five
| times", and the actual images get to me faster than a
| real human would notice a message on slack or email or
| whatever, let alone be able to actually attempt a fix.
|
| As for music... I actually made a procedural music
| generator back then (for the games while self-employed),
| and while neither the music nor the generator is going to
| win any awards, the output was sufficient for the games
| it went with. All the various new music AI are way better
| than what I did.
|
| [0] and now I realise the cliche; _ugh_
| pydry wrote:
| I've watched people who claim it is a game changer try to
| use it and I can see routinely leading them down rabbit
| holes in real time which they struggle to get out of.
|
| Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was
| never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the
| first place.
|
| I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak
| hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has
| yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot
| of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion,
| disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and
| express a level of optimism over future developments that
| is ludicrous.
| dasil003 wrote:
| It's early days on the product applications, but the
| fundamental power is being able to find correlations and
| connections across a huge corpus and output a large variety
| of rough ideas that can then be selected and polished by
| humans. It doesn't replace human expertise and creativity,
| but it will chip away at the bottom where many jobs are
| essentially rote tasks with very little human-level
| judgement needed, and more apropos to the GP, it will
| provide an increasingly powerful assist to human experts
| who learn how to harness it.
| packetlost wrote:
| I don't see how that's a better position than general
| automation, which software has been chipping away at the
| bottom rung of for decades. Most jobs outside of mass
| produced SEO Buzzfeed garbage are not about generating
| large amounts of believable sounding prose. I could see
| it chipping away at the bottom rung of customer support,
| but that very quickly turns into work where real
| decisions have to be made and an 80% correct output is
| not acceptable. I'd be extremely surprised if any half
| serious company lets an LLM decide whether a refund
| should be processed or rejected, for example.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Main benefit is it does boilerplate really well. You type a
| few letters and then hit tab, and now your test case is
| done.
|
| I did this as late as yesterday. Type in a case, type in a
| variant of the case that is more or less symmetric, it
| fills in what you would have typed. Or you add a member to
| your object, thus requiring it to be tested. It figures out
| that you need to check this new thing in all your tests.
|
| Other thing it does well is syntax. Some weird c++ template
| parameter thing, it does it for you. Little things like
| "what's that thing that makes the sort go the other way" it
| will know, and save you a minute of googling.
|
| What there doesn't seem to be is an interface for that I've
| found is any kind of refactoring. That's still a form of
| donkey work that a junior guy can do, but you'd think there
| would be some way for the AI to suggest DRY candidates and
| re-orgs.
| valenterry wrote:
| I find that to be true as well.
|
| It's just that boilerplate is usually an indication of a
| bad design or a bad/verbose language. Both of it are
| painpoints that should be fixed.
|
| But if that's not possible then Copilot is a good helper.
| gumby wrote:
| Looking at my phone and laptop, I have a lot of open source code,
| some $0 apps, some $50-$100 apps, and a couple of annual
| subscriptions for roughly $25/yr.
|
| It's interesting that those price points are sticky, like detents
| on a slide.
| smokel wrote:
| In 1993 in high school economics, our teacher explained that
| economics was based on scarcity. Even the most dimwitted
| individual would have to conclude that something is horribly
| wrong with economic models if governments would not soon make
| exceptions for the software industry.
|
| Fast forward 30 years, and many software developers and startups
| actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
| indymike wrote:
| > and many software developers and startups actually think that
| their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
|
| Supply < Demand.
|
| That is why developers are paid well. When demand softens, or
| supply increases even more, what developers are paid will
| change. The difference between software developers and other
| highly paid positions is that there is not enforced, artificial
| scarcity, such as licenses, advanced education requirements or
| required tests.
| hker999 wrote:
| Copying software that was built and saying there is no scarcity
| is like saying you should be able to spend the millions of
| dollars you made by copying a $100 bill multiple times on an
| inkjet.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| Are you implying software isn't valuable? Because that's just a
| non starter -- it obviously is.
| smokel wrote:
| No, I am implying that software reproduction is so easy, that
| it is not a scarce good, and classical economical models are
| a (very) bad fit.
|
| Custom software, or software for a small audience obviously
| is scarce, but a word processor or operating system with
| similar complexity that can be used by millions, if not
| billions of users, should not cost more _in total_.
|
| Open source (free) software would not even be possible if it
| were as scarce as, say, oil or apples.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| Sorry, I'm having trouble following along. Non sequitur?
|
| In what world is software comparable to apples or oil? We
| need a different analogy.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > and many software developers and startups actually think that
| their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
|
| Don't worry, the past year taught at least a few of us the hard
| way. Unfortunately when I was younger, I drank a lot of the
| industry kool aid.
| dharmab wrote:
| This is like saying books have no value because the cost of
| distribution is near zero.
|
| Books cost money because quality authorship is scarce and
| people are willing to pay for "ongoing support" (sequels and
| future works)
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