Message-ID: <346B4891.99485C7B@jdfdesign.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 11:36:01 -0700
From: "Joseph M. Ferris" <jferris@jdfdesign.com>
Organization: jdf design
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On Tue, 11 Nov 1997 15:02:23 -0500, -Ed- <not@home.now> wrote:

|Like I said, no rational person would purchase and use three different
|brands of word processing software on the same system.  (You want to
|come up with some convuluted set of circumstances to justify such an
|action then so be it, but most rational people know what I'm talking
|about here.)  To say that all three would have been bought is
|deceptive.  These are not three missed sales opportunities.
|
|If all three packages were bootlegs then it is reasonable to say that
|there was one missed sales opportunity because the user 1) needs a word
|prossesing program, and 2) would have had to have bought one to get it
|legitimately.  But, if the user bought Word for Windows and later
|acquired boots of Wordperfect and AMI pro and installed but never used
|them other than to look at them and say "oh, this is different", then
|neither maker of the two bootlegged packages can claim a lost a sales
|opportunity because the user 1) would have never purchased the product
|in the first place, and 2) did not benefit from its possesion.
|
|Is it still stolen property?  Yes, any idiot can figure that one out.
|
|
|-Ed-
|

Gee, I must be some kind of rarity.  I own more than one word processing
package, I use them all - not for some little reasons, but depending
upon what I want to do - and I paid for all of them.  I also own and
have bought more than one graphics package.  It seemed like a rational
decision, but hey... Who knows?

Software prices are set by fair market value - basic supply and demand. 
If you know basic economics, you would know that.  They aren't jacked up
because people will steal them - that would be a very paranoid stance
for a software author/company to take.  Even when people do steal
software, you set your price to sell the most copies at a given price. 
Raising the price is only going to decrease demand for legit copies.

I speak from experience - I have written various pieces of shareware,
and was able to find them at some Warez ftp sites when I was checking
for just that reason.  I lowered to price to something closer to the
fair market value, and guess what?  Sales went up, and finding the
software pirated was a hard thing to come by.

The average person that has illegitimate software on their system
wouldn't have paid five dollars for it in the discount bin in your local
WalMart.  You can't look at that and get scared of piracy.  God, if that
was the case, I would never write another piece of code again.

Are the prices on this software justified?  Hell yes!!!  Anyone who has
sat down and coded a project will tell you the same.  On any major
project, it takes hundreds of man-hours, if not more.  Let's see...  If
you have 6 programmers on a job that make $45 dollars an hour
(conservative, eh?) and the project runs each of them 500 hours before
release (that is also very conservative on a major release) that would
mean the cost going into it is 135,000.  Plus the cost to market it
would be (should be) approximately five times the amount of resources
put into it.  That would include advertising, packaging, documentation,
etc.  That comes out to a little over $800k.  Then the company selling
it has to recover its costs and then make a profit off of the
royalties.  The cost to own a piece of this work is well worth the price
of admission.  To argue that would be unreasonable.

That's all for now,

Joseph M. Ferris
