57% Only???? (Score 1)

Ruined by Suits

The software industry would have been great if we could have just kept "the suits" out of it. Any time you let techno-peasants with degrees make decisions, you create a "value detracted" situation. I remember attending one of the first COMDEX conventions. Encyclopedia Britannica was at the convention. I asked the dude in the booth about his 'wares'. He informed me that he had the entire EB on DVD for ONLY...... $1997.00 What a deal! "Hey Dude", I said.... "Did you know that a dvd costs only ...like 50 cents?

I suggested that if they found one idiot willing to part with $1997 for the data, please send me his email. I have some swamp land to sell him. I further suggested that If they marketed the product for $37 they might sell 30,000 of them. Nope. These guys with degrees couldn't wrap their heads around this concept. Where ae they today? Gonzo.

Google was later invented and Google showed us all how it's done. Microsoft grew so rapidly at first because with right from DOS 3, they used setup.ini so that pretty much anyone could copy the OS. I think their early marketing was based on pirate propulsion. For every one OS purchased there were likely a dozen copied. This was the original virus. In very short order, they owned the planet. Wordperfect lost to Word because they made their software more difficult to copy than Word. Wordperfect was a better word processor, but because only 1 in 300 were savvy enough to know how to copy it, Word walked all over them. Word was probably copied by 1 in 40.

Software companies need to learn a few things still. They need to price their products so that it is not worth it to copy them. Adobe is going to have to learn this lesson with its CS suite. $3000??? Who are you kidding Adobe? $499 should be the top. And don't yack at me about support costs. Screw support. In 30 years I've never found a support system worth anything. All you get is FAQ's (boy does that suck. Another invention by some techno-peasant). With bandwidth what it is and with rapid elearning solutions, companies should just create "how to" videos. People learn visually. My entire IT career has been vastly enriched by me just creating "How To" videos for anyone that wants to learn any software. When I get requests, I learn the software, then create rich media how to videos to provide private tutorial assistance to clients. Software companies would be well advised to just let the private industry take care of support like I've just explained. For those of us who do this kind of work, the earning potential is virtually unlimited.