Vik Olliver wrote: > Well, they might try and corner the PC hardware market too. Maybe the > Xbox is just a hardware marketing experiment. Bill the Bar*ed has > already said he expects software to cost more than hardware soon.
Decent software has cost more than the hardware it runs on for a long time. Even something as common as Photoshop 6.0 would cost me about what I paid for the computer (we're not all students!). Maybe they'll have a special now that version 7 is out :) But that's chicken feed compared to the software we use at work. I would hate to think what our Oracle installation is costing us, then there's the mechanical and electrical CAD packages, mathematical software, document management, project management, the list goes on. Last year we tried out some computational fluid dynamics software that costs around $30K per year for a single license. For that kind of money you could buy a seriously nice number-crunching machine to run it on and keep it pretty up-to-date (we'd borrowed a boring old 1.7GHz P4 for the trial). This argument doesn't apply to most people though because most of the software we need either comes bundled with the hardware, or is available for free (shareware/freeware/open source). So you're fine until you start needing the more advanced features of some commercial stuff (anyone got a full, legal copy of Photoshop 5.0 or later for sale?). Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (out of date)
