William Robb wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "mike wilson" Subject: Re: Photoshop CS Bargain Basement
Let's say you are a member of a large orchestra. You take years to learn your instrument and weeks to learn a particular piece, along with your colleagues. A huge investment of time and effort. It is recorded and released on CD. Why is it $6, not $600? The answer, of course, is the effect of scale. At a cheap price, you can sell more and make the same, or better, profit. I know there are other factors involved in the argument but, for me, software is _grotesquely_ overpriced. It would be really interesting to see if any company had the mettle to reduce their price by a couple of orders of magnitude to try to corner the market.
I did a seminar a few years back with a very good and successful photographer.
On pricing, he said that if you want to drop your price 10%, you will have to do 40% more work to make up for the price drop.
My Photoshop instructor mentioned one time that something like 90% of the installed Photoshop programs are pirated, with the other 10% being legitimate installs.
People will take things for free if they have the opportunity, no matter what the cost is. I see it every day, with people shoplifting cheap trinkets out of my store.
Pirating is what keeps the cost of software high. If those other 90% bought, everyone would pay significantly less. The cost of theft is built into the price, and the honest consumers pay for the crooks.
Not sure I agree with you (I don't think the photographer analogy stands up at all) and I still don't understand why music CDs are so much cheaper, given the development costs are similar. If pirating was causing high prices, recorded music prices should be astronomical. What is keeping the price high is that people are willing to pay it.
mike
