on 10/5/01 4:02 PM, Jamie Pruden at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Regrettably, this is a common misconception. People are going to pirate > software regardless of how little it costs. If Photoshop was $50, Adobe > could probably sell 4 times as many copies. However, the money that they > would make wouldn't support the effort to develop, test and market the > product. On top of that, there would STILL be a piracy problem. > > The number of people that will buy a software title vs. the price of the > software looks like a bell curve. Most software companies try to sell at > the price that's the peak of the curve. Why? Why not? If you were selling > widgets, you'd probably try to maximize your profit, right. Why is it so > bad for software companies to do the same thing?
Jamie- I agree with most of what you say... But that isn't my understanding of what a bell curve is... A bell curve looks generally like... A bell. :) You're right though, they try to stay in the sweet spot so they can charge as much per copy as possible, before sales drop too far because its too expensive to justify. > We Mac users bitch and moan about the lack of software for our platform, > then we go out and pirate the crap out of the software manufacturers. Go > figure why no one want to develop for us... That's just wrong... You're not a stupid guy (a little rabid, and defensive... But not stupid) so I know you know deep down that what you said above has no validity. The people who pirate software are in a very small minority compared to the masses of people who use mac software. If anything, its a much smaller group due to obvious reasons (size of the market vs. pc's, etc). Yes you can point to hotline which his a hotbed of pirated software, but the minute the made a pc version the number of servers just exploded. And if anything, when it really comes to piracy of very expensive applications... Very, very few shops making money off the software pirate. The people who do probably wouldn't have bought the software anyways, and most are people just doing goofy stuff with the software. They aren't laying out magazines, doing websites for fidelity, etc. lol, unless you're talking about china, which has an ungodly piracy rate. People are wary of publishing software for the mac (and linux) for one reason: economics. Out of new computers sold, macs are 5-7% of them (depending on who you ask). If I am developing a piece of software, it makes much more sense to develop it so that 90% of the people out there have the ability to run it and buy it. Yes, if I'm careful I can make it fairly cross-platform, but not always if you're using specific functions built into the OS, etc. Even with the development costs somewhat neutralized, you have to support 2 different platforms, test, etc. Economics. No software publisher goes, "well, we COULD make a mac version except they pirate everything so no one would truly buy it!" It makes sense to develop for the mac market when: A) it would be seriously hard for you to compete against existing products/companies in the pc market, and the mac market is an open book in a lot of ways. B) many of the users you want to target use the mac platform. Adobe ran into the second one awhile ago, when they released photoshop for the pc and quickly doubled their user-base if not more... Mac development took a short seat to the pc world for awhile, but suddenly the realized that most of them weren't the people who bought all their font collections, and other tools... And it hurt revenue. Ah well, I think everyone knows enough to know whats going on and tired of this thread, so I'm done. Peace :) -- Michael Bryan Bell http://homepage.mac.com/michael_bell/ -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Macintosh? Get free email and more at Applelinks! <http://www.applelinks.com>
