On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Matthew French wrote:
> Hmmm. I think it is not so much economies of scale, but the amount of
> work that needs to go into producing software.
How much work do you think goes into say the Oxford Dictionary?
> A book does not need to be tested or debugged. If it has a few typos
> then nobody will mind.
Pardon?
> A book does not have to be completely consistent and does not crash if
> it is printed on the wrong kind of paper. If a chapter does not make
> sense, then the reader can ignore it.
Of course it must be consistent! Not every book is a novel. When was the
last time you looked at a scientific textbook? Huge work has to go into it.
You can consider typos and errors as the same as bugs. If there's too many,
people won't buy it. Admittedly the rest of the book works, but that's the
same with a small bug in a program.
> I expect that *when* people realise this and start moving to cheaper
> software, MS will drop the price of their products to £5 a license and
> still make a profit. Personally I think the amount of money they are
> charging for XP and Office XP is both cynical and obscene.
Well I don't know about that but I agree it's horrendously expensive. I've
built a few machines for friends who need/want this stuff and even the OEM copies are very expensive.
Gavin
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