Lutger wrote:
language_fan wrote:
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.
Yet this poor performance annoys people to no end. I don't know a single
person who isn't irritated by their PDF bloatware, and all my 'tech-savvy'
friends have switched to other PDF readers. Same with IE, I know lots of
people switched to firefox just because of performance, and then some
switched again to Opera or Chrome because even Firefox is too slow.
I agree with Lutger here, these companies just sit on their success and
monopoly as excuses to not optimize their software. That and tight
deadlines on new versions which prevents even the best of programmers to
properly optimize code. Often when the programmer says "it works, but I
can get it 10times faster given another week" to his manager, when that
reaches the top of the corporate chain, the CEO only hears "it works".
These companies are just shooting themselves in the foot in the long
run. IE is losing the market share it fought so hard to steal. Acrobat
is used less and less, I myself use it only to print files, I can almost
always find a text version of a pdf document within seconds. Loading the
pdf reader is way slower than going back to google and clicking the next
link.
While a lot of people targeted by these heavy softwares change hardware
every now and then, they can do so because they make enough from their
work. Any newcomer or novice just wanting to learn to someday get a job
in the domain usually has no money to upgrade his old computer.
And yeah, most people will download these programs to learn, and buy
licenses when they turn professional but not all of them, I see that all
the time. They would sell way more copies of photoshop if it was
actually easy to buy.
