Who should set the price for the original sale of digital products? 2

[diogenes10]

This started with a conversation in another thread.
The other thread is already quite long, this is off topic in that thread, and it may be considered a business rather than ethics item, in which case i did not want it to get the other interesting thread pulled.

There are economic issues here in terms of cost and return.
However I believe that posters in various threads also start from a premise that it is an ethical issue in regard to such things as the quantity of profit, the incentive to make the manufacturing processes as efficient as possible, the functionality of the product and marketing techniques such as increasing the quanity of items in one package to justify a higher price regardless of quality, functionality, etc of the total package.

 

[diogenes10]

There's been an untimely death in the family. My operating system to end all operating systems and my state of the art hardware are dead!!! They must be dead -- my application vendor wont let me see them anymore. I spent around an hour and a half grieving last night -- looking for a place to put the blame. The short answer is the operating system supplier is who I blame the most.

 

[diogenes10]

Well
I was struggling with some questions
If I could invalidate the free market premise would folks be required to give different answers?
Can I invalidate it?
Would using names generate a constructive discussion beyond a what if game?
If I have names is it going to be an ethics discussion or a pricing discussion?

A list like the following coalesces in my mind:
Microsoft
Adobe
Accounting system suppliers
McAfee Virus Scan
AVG virus scan
JV16 Power Tools
Spybot

Two things then came to mind as I considered this.

The first is that everything below Microsoft is based on Microsoft. So the free market model premise may not apply.
Does Microsoft as an operating system supplier face the same levels of competition as suppliers of accounting packages based on Microsoft operating systems.

It then occurred to me that there was a somewhat different upgrade/obsolesence path in the two businesses.
Looking at accounting packages (and some of the other items on the list above) I think I see something like a 1948 Plymouth Cranbrook, a 1949 Cranbrook and so on -- and then a 1962 Plymouth Fury, a 1963 Fury, and so on.
Looking at the operating system, it's more like looking at some kind of version of Durant building GM, a Pontiac, An Oldsmobile, A Chevrolet and so on. But then once started a line is abandoned.

I'm out of time to try to think this through further right now-but i think there's a path forward based on ethical issues as well as one based on technical issues.

 

[edfair]

For a good long time in the thread M$ was not mentioned and I thought that a good thing since there are strong feelings raised in people of various persuasions regarding them.

No, those things below MS in the list are not neccessarily dependent on MS. Several of the accounting packages are ported across several software platforms and even across hardware platforms that use different software platforms.

And several of your items are free market solutions to shortcomings in MS products.

So why no more competition to MS operating systems? I propose that it the same lack of hubris that we sometimes associate with MS.
In the Apple version " You'll compute the way I want you to compute, or you won't compute". It took almost 10 years for the fallacy of that approach to take hold and it still isn't totally gone.
It took about 1 year for the IBM MCA to get trashed, but it helped that MS was in a position to enable the hardware designers to compete. Then the rather rapid decline of OS2 because the benefits never showed up.

I think you are taking too short a timeline into account. I realize you would like to see changes now, but it won't happen. Open source is coming, but it will probably be 5 years before it has a critical base.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[diogenes10]

I guess part of my problem in discussing things is that I am not technically knowledgeable enough to be fully aware of the range of options available or the ways in which they could be presented to decision makers to show there are options. I picked things on that list to help me think about different pricing techniques-to try to think about free market and relative involvement of seller and buyer in setting a price and who had moral responsibilities. They each seemed to me to be representative of a slightly different approach.

A comment offered above was to the effect that it was difficult to comment on ethical issues since no one but me knew specifically who or what I was talking about. So I thought I would list it as my frame of reference.

If there are alternative choices even at the operating system level, then that would seem to weaken my position that a purchaser is having a value forced on them from a position of strength and go more toward sleipnir and gg's comments about technological advance and a need to be technologically informed in making a purchase.

I still think there is a responsibility of the software makers to the users though. and again I'm having a little trouble - the Judaeo Christian scriptures indicate all sin is equal in the eyes of God. So do I bring that across and say the operating system people and the application people have an equal responsibility to their users? Not sure.

I guess my concern is that the operating system affects all potential users of a related software/hardware base while applications affect a smaller user base. They both have a responsibility to ethical and responsible in their corporate behavior, but an ethical shortcoming or technical failure at the operating system level seems to me to have much more wide ranging affects than a failure at the application level.

 

[sleipnir214]

diogenes10:
There are lots of choices at the OS level. Choices that are becoming viable enough that Mi¢ro$oft has groups within the company dedicated to fighting it. Here is a recent example of organizations choosing to use non-Mi¢ro$oft software:

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2003052802126NWDTPB

. Whole nations are either implementing non-Mi¢ro$oft solutions or are passing laws requiring that non-proprietary solutions be examined before awarding contracts.

Does a software company have the ethical obligation to publish the best software it can? Yes, it does. But that answer begs another question: What is "best"? If my software is the only one in a market, then by definition my software is the best. (It must also be the worst, too.)

It is competition that drives rapid improvements to anything. In the 1970's, GM began building crappy cars -- in fact, it was GM that coined the phrase "planned obsolescence". They build a series of automobiles that were designed to be literally disposable -- you'd drive one for a couple of years and get rid of it to buy a new one. GM thought they could get away with it and would have, had the Japanese manufacturers not entered the U.S. market with cars of similar price but better quality. This forced GM to abandon the concept of planned obsolescence and start building decent cars again. We're seeing something similar now with the rising sales of less-expensive Korean cars today.

For a very long time, Mi¢ro$oft had no real competition of any kind. The difference between them and GM is that they seemed to have anticipated competition -- Mi¢ro$oft seems to have spent more time entrenching than improving. But without a competitor to hightlight the flaws, their was no real impetus to substantially improve their software.

Today, big companies are taking a real interest in non-Mi¢ro$oft software. IBM is staking significant resources on Linux. IBM, Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, J. D. Edwards and EDS are all producing software to run on Linux.


But always keep in mind that software purchasing decision-making definately falls into realm of "Caveat Emptor". No company has any ethical responsibility to inform a potential customer about the company's competitors' products.





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