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.
