Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Tue, 27 May 2003
How do we pay for value?
Ross Mayfield's
comments in the Paying for Software thread have come closest for me.
[15:53] |
[computers/open_source] |
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TB |
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2 Comments |
I buy software when I know it will get better, rather than worse, over time.There are some pieces of software that I depend on. That software needs to improve. It needs bug fixes, it needs to move to new versions of operating systems, it needs new features, etc. I've been disappointed by software that I've depended on in the past. Symantec took More and stopped development on it. You could argue that this action didn't affect the value of the copy of More that I already had, but I certainly didn't feel that way. I invested a lot of money and effort into a program called Arrange, by a nice group of people in Palo Alto. They didn't make it, and all my data ended up locked up in Arrange. Some years later I switched from the Macintosh to Windows. I used a program called Ecco. Netmanage stopped development on Ecco. There was nothing wrong with the copy of Ecco that I still use. But it doesn't grow, it can't talk to my PocketPC, and its web integration is lacking. Traditionally, we've assigned the value in software to the software itself. But without the people who wrote the software, the software has markedly less value. I'm more than happy to pay people to keep working on the software (if you like, you can think of this as a service), but my experience (and hard-earned money) shows that paying for the software alone is a dubious value proposition. So to me, the question is: Where is the value, and how do we make sure that when we pay (because as Mark Bernstein points out, we do pay), that we are paying to get the value that we want? I don't have an answer for this yet, but our industry is going to have to come up with one.
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well, its sometimes not directly the company's fault. The best voice-recognition software package (something so small it worked on a cheap win98 laptop, but hey, it worked) was Dragon Naturally-Speaking. The owners (who built the program over the course of some 20 years) eventually sold out to a company to help keep the financing up for its product roll-out and all that.
Well, that company got eaten up, by one which got eaten up, by one which got eaten up, etc...'til it eventually ended up one of the serious victims in the Enron disaster. The rediculous rampant consolidation doesn't just happen within a single industry (e.g., the local phone services). And the casualties can often by the products we value.
Joe
Posted by Joe at Tue May 27 19:35:18 2003
Well, that company got eaten up, by one which got eaten up, by one which got eaten up, etc...'til it eventually ended up one of the serious victims in the Enron disaster. The rediculous rampant consolidation doesn't just happen within a single industry (e.g., the local phone services). And the casualties can often by the products we value.
Joe
Posted by Joe at Tue May 27 19:35:18 2003
Joe,
You are right, it's not always the companies, fault. But the point going around is that it's important to pay for software, as if paying for software is going to prevent products from being orphaned, bring about new and innovative software, etc. Throwing money at a problem is not the way to solve it. The value is not in the software itself, or the company selling the software. It's in the people who actually did the work.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed May 28 16:34:10 2003
You are right, it's not always the companies, fault. But the point going around is that it's important to pay for software, as if paying for software is going to prevent products from being orphaned, bring about new and innovative software, etc. Throwing money at a problem is not the way to solve it. The value is not in the software itself, or the company selling the software. It's in the people who actually did the work.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed May 28 16:34:10 2003
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