Re: a few complaints about the blind comunity
I appreciate the point about running a company, however equally there is another side to it, sinse I am not always convinced how much prophet is being made by these companies relative to their costs, especially given the number of government contracts people like freedom scientific have and the fact that other accessible software doesn't cost the same price.
Take blind square as an example. I paid £16 for it, which is relatively expensive for an Iphone ap but peanuts in comparison to say the thousand or so I'd need to pay for a program like Jaws. Now undoubtedly blindsquare is a much simpler program and took less development time, however if the arguement about paying a developer's yearly salary is absolutely true, then logically all accessible software products which were developed by the same number of programmers should cost roughly the same. After all the projected sales for blind square are likely much the same as those for Jaws, indeed if anything possibly less sinse Blindsquare is far less likely to be bought by governmental agencies and also will only be bought by Vi Iphone users.
Even before the ap store craze, contrast the price of something like Jaws with Sueprnova which has always been half as expensive, indeed my initial license was £600 where as for jaws it would've been £1100.
This is undoubtedly a lot of money, but the fact that there is fluctuation in the prices of similar peaces of software does rather imply that there is a degree of greed going on here. which is really the central issue and one of the problems with access tech, sinse we can't be exactly sure what the sales figures for someone like Freedom scientific or dolphin are and how much they are actually making relative to development costs.
In any capitalist system, theoretically competition is a limiting factor on price. If I am a farmer and am selling my carrots for two pounds a bunch but the farmer next door selling his carrots for one pound a bunch, ---- well obviously people are going to go to him and not me so I will need to alter my prices.
In access tech however, there are very few producers of the products, which frequently means people can charge what the hell they like sinse there isn't the competition to drive the price down correctly and people often don't have the choice to go elsewhere. To use my carrot example, it is as if I owned all the land and so if people wanted carrots they had to buy them at two quid a bunch from me or nothing, ---- which is pretty much the way most of the business world is tending these days, though that is another arguement, (oopse, my marxism is showing), .
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
