On Fri, Oct 20, 2000 at 08:17:27PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
>> AFAIK, there is no price discrimination against reporting bugs,
>> but there is price discrimination against demanding bug-fixes,
>> which is very different. ...
>> The point I think you miss is that reporting a bug is GOOD
>> for the software provider, because a bug that isn't reported
>> is a bug that hurts the company's reputation nonetheless;...
>> So you shouldn't discourage people from reporting bugs.
>
> I didn't miss this point, but can such companies really commit to not take
> advantage of information about individual demand?
>
They DO take advantage of the information:
they schedule their support resources in priority
to customers that have paid the more expensive support package!
If you don't pay for better support, you have to wait longer (maybe months)
before your bug is corrected. If you find a bug and need a fix,
they'll tell you to either wait or upgrade your support contract.
Hence, bug reporters ARE incited to pay more,
but they are incited to pay as victims who will receive help,
not as reporters who do provide advice.
Exceptions of course are bugs that would damage the vendor's reputation
if it is not fixed fast (i.e. security bug with remote exploit
or bug causing incorrect result, particularly for bugs that affects
many unknowing customers, including priority ones).
In these cases, they fix it fast, but not for the sake of the bug reporter,
rather for their own.
Competition between companies (when it exists) ensures that all the delays
(including for non-paying bug reporters) will not grow overlarge.
>> ... to Microsoft and monopolistic software vendors,
>> reporting bug is use of resources, and fixing bugs is no source of revenue.
> I'm sorry, but this makes zero economic sense. The higher the value
> of the product to users, the higher the monopoly price they can charge.
Wrong: it isn't a de facto monopoly,
in a free market with virtual competition.
It's a de jure monopoly in a rent situation.
They gain more by finding ways to extend their rent
(i.e. add features to their products to always be one step away
in incompatibility wrt people who reverse-engineer their software,
so as to create waves of forced upgrade),
than by actually creating value for customers
(who don't need all the whizzbang,
but need reliable systems that do the job).
This is all the truer with their business model of pay once
for the software as a product, service included until next upgrade:
the cost of customer-driven bug fixes is a complete loss,
since in the case of Microsoft, it never generates any revenue.
Of course, they need to create _some_ value, and they _do_ create value,
so as to be able to sell their software at all.
But their marginal gain in creating user-demanded feature is low.
I might even be so low as to be negative:
if they incrementally satisfied in bug fix packages
all their users' requests for marginal improvement,
the need for full system upgrade would be nil,
and their business model of software sale would collapse.
They need to create value, but for their business model to work,
they need to not let the user give the impulse,
for competition has as much access to user desires as they;
they need to give their own direction and have the users follow,
by tying with their monopoly _some_ of the things that users value
with new stuff that they do not value, and that will keep the
system incompatible with competition.
[Hence the famous proverb of times before Excel won the war:
"MS-DOS is not finished as long as Lotus 1-2-3 still runs."]
There's a _deep_ difference between the free market business model
of software service, embodied by free software, and the government-sponsored
monopoly non-market business model of software sale, embodied by Microsoft,
with a lot of mixed models in-between.
Information Privileges do promote creation of software, but just not
any kind of software: the kind of software that will lock you in
half-solutions that never fully work, and must constantly upgrade,
yet with which you'll constantly be frustrated.
[ Fran�ois-Ren� �VB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they seem to believe that
for a group of people to behave in a way detrimental to the common good
requires intent.
