Forced Upgrades

Posted by Andy Brice
Jun 11, 2019 at 09:32 PM

Hugh wrote:
>The current macOS market environment, dominated by Apple’s app stores,
>(I’m less familiar with the Windows situation) is about as close as one
>can get in the real world to what my old economics lecturer called
>“perfect competition”, where prices are forced down competitively to the
>lowest just-sustainable level. Great for consumers in the short-term.
>Not so great for producers - and not so great for consumers in the
>long-term if good producers are not able to afford to invest for the
>future.

IIRC perfect competition is where the cost of a product is equal to its marginal cost of production. And the marginal cost of software (the cost to ship 1 extra copy) is zero (if you give no support).

Things do seem to be headed in that direction for commodity software. Many games and utilities are now free, just about supported by ever more intrusive ads.

I tried downloading a couple of games on my iPhone recently. The were completely unplayable due to the intrusive ads.

It is a race to the bottom. As a vendor and a consumer of software, I don’t really like where it is heading.

—

Andy Brice
https://www.hyperplan.com