Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:59:06 -0600, Rainer Deyke thusly wrote: > Software is priced to optimize total income, which is net income per > unit times number of units sold. Production costs are not factored in > at all. So the real question is if your $50 software package sells > enough additional units to make up for the increase in production costs.
Sure, that is the way it works. But still I think the main motivator for customers is the price. It does not really matter if the latest photoshop runs on a Pentium 233MMX or requires a dual-core with 4GB of RAM for e.g. scaling 5MPix images. The target audience upgrades their hardware anyways and the differences between user interfaces is so huge that competition is inexistant. The poorer customers first use a pirated version of photoshop, and only after gaining some popularity buy the licenses rather than use free software like gimp. Optimizing the software will not bring adobe more customers. You can see their optimizing policy in the famous flash plugin and pdf reader. Performance on both programs is just horrible and I could well imagine that a novice programmer built both of them.
