|
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer AgeYou have no trouble with uncollectible bills; if someone won't pay, you can just turn off the service. And there is no possibility of piracy. That last "advantage" may turn out to be a problem. Some amount of piracy is to the advantage of software companies. If some user would never have bought your software at any price, you haven't lost anything if he uses a pirated copy. In fact you gain, because he is one more user helping to make your software the standard—or who might buy a copy later, when he graduates from high school. When they can, companies like to do something called price discrimination, which means charging each customer as much as they can afford. Software is particularly suitable for price discrimination, because the marginal cost is close to zero. This is why some software costs more to run on Suns than on Intel boxes: a company that uses Suns is not interested in saving money and can safely be charged more. Piracy is effectively the lowest tier of price discrimination. I think software companies understand this and deliberately turn a blind eye to some kinds of piracy ...» |
Код для вставки книги в блог HTML
phpBB
текст
|
|