Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Argues 'Supply and Demand' Doesn't Apply To Software (gatesnotes.com)
"Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend," writes Bill Gates, challenging the widespread use of forecasts and policies based on a "supply and demand" economic model. An anonymous reader quotes the Gates Notes blog:
Software doesn't work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn't the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.
The portion of the world's economy that doesn't fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven't kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn't getting enough attention. If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about as good an explanation as I've seen.... They don't act like there's something evil about the trend or prescribe hard policy solutions. Instead they take the time to convince you why this transition is important and offer broad ideas about what countries can do to keep up in a world where the "Ec 10" supply and demand chart is increasingly irrelevant.
"What the book reinforced for me is that lawmakers need to adjust their economic policymaking to reflect these new realities," Gates writes, adding "a lot has changed since the 1980s. It's time the way we think about the economy does, too."
The portion of the world's economy that doesn't fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven't kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn't getting enough attention. If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about as good an explanation as I've seen.... They don't act like there's something evil about the trend or prescribe hard policy solutions. Instead they take the time to convince you why this transition is important and offer broad ideas about what countries can do to keep up in a world where the "Ec 10" supply and demand chart is increasingly irrelevant.
"What the book reinforced for me is that lawmakers need to adjust their economic policymaking to reflect these new realities," Gates writes, adding "a lot has changed since the 1980s. It's time the way we think about the economy does, too."
The problem is that companies are not sharing the cost benefits of technology, period. Case in point, eBooks are less expensive to produce, yet they usually cost more than the real book.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The thing people have wrong about software is that it's not the copy of the executable that is the scarce and valuable resources - it's the programmers (although, decreasingly so; actual coding is indeed becoming a commodity) and, more importantly, the expertise of knowing what kind of software to make and the knowledge of how to best use that software.
There is still supply and demand in an "information economy" - it's just that people tend to misidentify the thing that is scarce.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
You just explained what we obviously knew for at the very least 120 years, since it's basically the reason behind the Berne Convention.
Did you just run out of stuff to say, or what's the motivation behind it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
True. Not to mention the ultimate zero-sum game, which is choice. Some software designers make sensible choices; if that does not work for you, your only option is to code up your own package. This means that supply and demand are measured on the level of what fits the need for a given solution as well.
Alternative Right.
Prices are controlled in many cases by the whims of the copyright owners. If Microsoft says you have to pay them $200 (hypothetically) for a (legal) copy of Windows or Office, that is so. But if the difference to alternatives gets too large, people might accept the effort to switch to something else. A case of price elastic demand, quite well known in traditional economy.
Some anecdotal evidence about myself:
I have switched to Libre office myself for private use, partly for financial reasons, partly for political ones (I really don't want to feed Microsoft money). Also planning to use Linux when support for Win7 runs out.
But if Microsoft were to drop the price of Windows to $20, laziness might win out and keep me on Windows. On Libre Office they have lost me permanently, as I already have put in that effort to get familiar with the new tool. Wasn't much effort either, only inserting images into documents is still a bit cumbersome and annoying.
Where Bill Gates is right are those cases where a satisfactory free alternative already exists and people can adopt it effortlessly. In those cases, the opportunity to make money from the main product is gone. Perhaps you can still earn money from add-ons to the free product.
C - the footgun of programming languages
HL3
Microsoft (+bill gates) got rich by indecent behavior, by lying and such. There products got better of course over years. Now bill gates has a foundation, like all rich people, to pay less taxes, not for the betterment of humankind...
That's the same reason that big pharma uses to overcharge its customers. It is nothing new, nor did Mr Gates have some magical revelation. He is just now noticing what the pharma industry (and others) have known for decades.
He seems to have forgotten that the whole industry was getting very excited about software as either a service or a subscription because it was not making enough money from single-time sales because of support costs, usually patching the various security holes and glitches that the bureaucracy and its low-cost code stooges overlooked.
Alternative Right.
Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce
Although that doesn't mean there are no costs.
There are support costs, distribution costs, the technical deficit cost from bugs, patches, security holes, backwards compatibility and future integration-ability.
So while there may not be customer supply-and-demand, there is certainly a cost to the supply (and demand) of other factors. Not the least is finding and keeping the talent to support all this stuff through its lifetime.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Everyone contributes what they want, everyone takes what they need and the world improves over it.
You can only have that with digital goods that can be multiplied instantaniously with basically zero cost.
That's why proprietary software always dies out in the long run and loses over to FOSS eventually.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Bill Gates doesn't understand economics. There have always been recurring and non-recurring costs to produce a thing. He thinks that the economic basics have changed just because the recurring cost is now very small compared to the non-recurring costs. The only economic difference is that the supply curve looks much different; the law of supply and demand remains as true as it ever was.
> A free economy can work just fine with free software.
I'm pretty out there in the pro-FOSS direction, but I have to say, you couldn't be more wrong. There are very few FOSS programs which can replace the very expensive, niche software which drives a lot of the development of modern technology. For FOSS to work, you need to have one (or both) of two things: either a mainstream-enough problem which will attract a sufficient staff of volunteers who are sufficiently skilled in the particular problem domain, OR enough companies willing to join forces to develop a shared FOSS product which all of them need.
There are enumerable proprietary programs which are niche enough to bypass the first, yet not expensive enough that companies would consider developing a shared FOSS solution.
The irony here, of course, is that "operating systems for personal computers" would seem to fall in the first category.
Right now, Windows 10 Pro costs around 120 Euros in Germany (System Builder which is legal to unbundle here, no dubious ESD key). That's around $140.
I am neither a student nor employed in a company that has something like a HUP going, so for me it would be the full price of the SB edition. It seems that Microsoft think they have piracy mostly under control and Linux is not a threat.
For now, they might even be right about the latter. Linux is running on a lot servers, embedded and mobile devices (low level basis of Android), but on the desktop the market share remains small. The desktop and part of the server market happens to be where Microsoft earns most of its money.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Ethics Violation via - How to become wealthy is make people need you - bill gates.
How did he do that? He cheated the users by not providing the three primary user interfaces and yelling piracy as well as getting the rest of the software industry to do the same with the money he was making with the cheat, they wanted to make the money gobs too.
Cheat the users and now the AI industry needs the users but the users don't care and they don't even know it and this extends to a software industry slowly crashing like how to cook a frog, turn up the heat slow, but here its crashing slow, and they don't even know it too..
http://3seas.org/EAD-RFI-respo... http://3seas.org/ for a clue and verification.
Ethics Violation via - How to become wealthy is make people need you - bill gates.
How did he do that? He cheated the users by not providing the three primary user interfaces and yelling piracy as well as getting the rest of the software industry to do the same with the money he was making with the cheat, they wanted to make the money gobs too.
Cheat the users and now the AI industry needs the users but the users don't care and they don't even know it and this extends to a software industry slowly crashing like how to cook a frog, turn up the heat slow, but here its crashing slow, and they don't even know it too..
http://3seas.org/EAD-RFI-respo... making it obvious the long-running ethics violation - Can AI ever become ethical. NOT while built on a ethics violation foundation.
So what is going on now to promote AI? The struggle to figure out what abstract sequences to use in marketing to bait and switch get the general public to buy while forcing AI on the consumers/users where ever they can, and behind their backs.
If there is anything simple and accurate to say about the tech industry it is this: It is a very self-serving industry that will blame its customers for its failures. It is why software licenses are in essence, use at your own risk, but pay us over and over while we sell you a way to better compete until we sell to everyone then we will sell you the next version - rinse and repeat.
The proven BS of an industry that is heading to be the next government of the people. From the Churchs of various types of governance to the government of governance of various types to the coming AI directed governance of the people and all have in common corruption.
see/read/do http://3seas.org/ for a clue and verification.
Obviously software doesn't follow the old rules of supply and demand. Going back to the invention of copyright, the idea was to allow authors to create artificial scarcity of something that could be easily replicated. It was to take a thing of virtually unlimited supply, and shoehorn it into the model of supply and demand.
And though it's not really a "software" problem, the copyright system stops working when the cost of replication goes from "extremely cheap" to "virtually free". We've tried to keep the shoehorn by inventing DRM and making new laws, but it's not really working.
Worse, it's detrimental to society. The indefinite extension of copyright, combined with DRM and incompatibilities, means that we're going to lose the history of our intellectual works. You can still look at a 500 year old painting or read a 500 year old book, but it's not clear whether you'll be able to try current software or play current video games 500 years from now. It's a problem that, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a problem that people are considering when they create DRM or modify copyright law.
Writing here about a software industry slow crash and a hint of it actually happens. The second post (reply to myself) was what I wrote for my initial post. Something changed it. Let's call it "Overcomplexifabulication."
The price doesn't go down because eBooks represent a production/distribution innovation by book publishers and distributors.
Not quite. The price does not go down (or ve goes up) because people are willing to pay more for the convenience of being instantly able to purchase any book they want. Prices for things are set by what the market will bear, not how much it cost to produce. Successful products are ones where the price is a lot higher than the cost to produce.
Competition is what normally prevents the gap between production costs and selling price remaining large but for ebooks each book has its own monopoly controlled by a large publisher so there is little to no competition...which is one of the many reasons why copyright needs a bit of a rethink/rebalance in our modern age.
And then you click the Amazon link and you see these prices:
Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
Hardcover $29.95 (physical copy)
Paperback $18.95 (physical copy)
Kindle $23.79 (digital copy)
#DeleteFacebook
The goal to civilization is too.
1. Keep people alive
2. Keep people productive
We learned to group with other people often with diverse needs and skills to provide protection for the hazards of the world.
A mammoth could feed 100 people.
A dozen of the strogest and fastest could take a mammoth down. But after that hunt they will be worn out. So we have other people who is foot at prepping the food cooking it. Then you need to feed children who will be needed to replace these roles. Other people will be needed to help create fire, build and maintain structure.... then when they get to a particular size you need people to try to distribute the needs equally...
Today’s culture are extremely advanced. Capitalism and free market is still a good way to manage many aspects of such a culture without micromanage everyone’s lives.
But the days of old where a culture of 100 people can be managed by a chief people were actually treated more equally without money but more of a meritocracy that we seem to strive for. Because the cost of not using people for what they are best at can cause death.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Microsoft appears to gradually moving away from one time licenses, not only with office 365.
Most versions of Windows 10 do automatically update without asking the user for permission, at best the user can delay that for three months or so (in the Pro version). The one exception is Windows 10 LTSB, which is only available for companies and as some sort of volume license.
That may be the first step towards a rental model, where such auto-upgrades are entirely mandatory.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yes, and this "a lot of money to develop the first unit" is what is risky and what capitalists actually invest in.
But the premise is false too, because much of the software industry is a service industry, meaning that after the initial sale, there is support and maintenance. This may be a foreign concept to Microsoft, but it is a business necessity to other software companies.
And let's not kid ourselves why Bill Gates is starting to hate the market: it's kicking his ass and destroying the little monopoly he thought he had locked up in perpetuity. And like so many wannabe monopolists before him, he embraces unsavory ideologies and runs to government and politics for validation and help.
It doesn't matter if it's some factory where the production line starts at processing raw ore and ends where steel pipes come out, or a company that makes software or movies. Both require a large initial investment.
For now, they might even be right about the latter. Linux is running on a lot servers, embedded and mobile devices (low level basis of Android), but on the desktop the market share remains small. The desktop and part of the server market happens to be where Microsoft earns most of its money.
I think Linux is the only reason they still support windows 7 the little bit that they do. They realized cutting XP support didn't get everybody to switch to even 7, and there is testimony all over the internet and /. of people even putting their parents and other family on linux once windows 7 support ends. So I think that there is a chance we either see Windows 7 live on another decade, or they lose a decent chunk of their windows base to Linux and leave the other chunk vulnerable.
Why would Bill Gates hate the market? He's out of the market; he hasn't been head of Microsoft for decades. He has more money than he can possibly spend. As long as the economy doesn't crash to Argentina levels, his interest in it is purely intellectual.
Yes he was a monopolist. Yes he did scummy things to drive profits. That was then, this is now. His current opinions have little to do with his past policies.
It still does, just not to him any more.
To be fair, he actually is giving a lot of his money to support a lot of things that are completely unrelated to software and computers.
#DeleteFacebook
Well, at least it was free.
Thank you.
#DeleteFacebook
Because of the cost of reproduction/distribution (essentially zero), software will ALWAYS race to that cost. There will always be someone willing to take your idea and write it for cheaper, and sell it for cheaper. There is no "hard floor" in terms of materials or required infrastructure to make each copy. The barrier to entry is simply the cost of marketing - and the cost of sales/distribution is nearly zero.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
On the contrary. Support is where you should be making your money.
On the other hand, when support is you main income then you'll do everything you can to make your software complicated and hard to use.
#DeleteFacebook
Well, you're half-right.
Supply does not apply anymore.
Demand is limited to the number of compatible devices.
And for specialized software, demand is limited to a subset of users of said compatible devices.
#DeleteFacebook
I think you inhaled a bit too much of this blue, vanilla flavoured fume.
#DeleteFacebook
"Software doesn't work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce."
While that is true, there is a significant cost to supporting customers, the more customers, the higher the cost. Well, if you actually provide support, that is.
every maker of a piece of proprietary software has a monopoly on that software
It's called rent seeking. And I don't think Gates really missed it. He just tip-toed around his industries need to control supplies so as to maintain profits. Lest some governments wake up to that and implement taxes and regulations to discourage it beyond a reasonable return on investment
Heaven forbid we go to a VAT tax, where companies with zero cost products end up paying stiff taxes. Or patent/copyright terms are reduced to encourage competition. Or 'intellectual property' is assessed actual property taxes.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously half the commenters are so wrapped up in virtue signalling that they didn't even bother to try and understand what has been said. Two points were made:
1)The marginal cost to software (and books, and movies and some financial services) is almost zero. Yes, there is some small cost to produce a physical copy and licensing might cost pennies. Patches are not a marginal cost, you create the patch whether you sell one or one million copies. Customer support is customer support it is separate and most software I use, I've never used any support for.
2) And this is the big point. The part of the economy that works on this new model of low or almost zero marginal cost is now significant.
2 is new and it has significant impact on how the economy will function and we need to change regulations and other behaviours because of this.
Yes of course supply and demand applies unless you have a monopoly.
It's why I use an opensource stack on Windows and when windows goes to a subscription based operating system where they are the owners, I'll go to linux 100%. I may go sooner than that actually.
I *OWN* my computer damn it.
So while I have a bright shiny Windows 2010 full Office install DVD, it sits unopened and i use Libreoffice writer, calc, etc. And Gimp. And Audacity, VLC.
Anyone who would like to recommend any other good open source cheap/free software let me know.
I don't mind paying a couple bucks but I want to *own* the thing. Not *rent* it.
Once you start renting it, they can raise the price any time they want. They can delete content (ala Amazon) anytime they want.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The marginal cost of manufacturing physical goods has dropped steadily for centuries. The cost to develop a new physical product has risen.
Pharmaceuticals and electronics are good examples of this. The cost to manufacture one pill or one microchip is tiny once the tooling has been bought and validated. The cost to design, build, and validate that tooling is very high.
This isn't new, at all.There are several ways to account for high up-front costs and low marginal cost.
That's why proprietary software always dies out in the long run and loses over to FOSS eventually.
"Always" is a strong word. When has this been the case in, for example, video games or streaming players for rented movies or income tax return calculation software? Those segments of the software industry have peculiarities that cause them to differ from the segments where free software shines: libraries and other tools with stable, well-defined requirements.
I expect things to go like they went with Windows XP. Windows 7 gets a few years of support extension (security only), then is finally de-supported. Some diehards stay on Win7 anyway.
BTW, XP still has 5.2% market share in the netmarketshare.com statistics.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Nice PR stunt by Bill Gates to divert our attention while Microsoft works hard in the rear to make Windows 10 as a service making the traditional view about intellectual property less relevant. The traditional view started to develop 300 years ago (Statute of Anne 1710) during advent of printing industry that made copying easier and cheaper, and revised in 1980's for the software. Why rent about that now when (thanks to recent advances in network speed which made it possible) Microsoft is strongly pushing for its products like office application and OS as an online service?
Back, back...way back at the beginning of DOS was the claim that real capital was made selling it and keeping it to sell again... ad infinitum
supply and demand applies to marketing. not software. software allows marketing to catch up with supply and demand. ok sales people. lunch time is over. keep up with software...yeah...right.
Interesting story. I wish the Slashdot discussion lived up to it, but so far I haven't found any trace. Usual searches, etc.
It would be nice to blame this opening post. Too bad it buries the actual insight, notwithstanding the typical first-post mod. The value and price of the ebook reflects supply and demand, but these are not the supplies and demands you are looking for.
The suckers... Er, Of course I mean the customers are paying extra for the convenience. Same as it ever was if you think about it wrong. (Searching on "convenience", I discovered a couple of relevant thoughts, but not moderated appropriately. Again the Slashdot moderation is failing to do its job.)
What is actually important is the TIME spent reading those books, and economists don't care because time is so hard to count compared to money. On one hand, we all live it and experience it exactly the same way. On the second hand, no one knows how much they really have. On the third hand, not all uses of time are equal in the pursuit of happiness, but on the fourth hand, we all value time quite highly. Lots more hands to go, but my main point is that the best new way to think about the economy that I've found involves putting the cart of money BEHIND the horse of time.
Now about that Capitalism without Capital book... Ah, I see a copy in a not so local library, but I can make the journey soon enough. I hate being an early adopter, but I'm happy to be an early rejecter of Amazon. Almost two decades of being Amazon-cancer free.
Other references? Most relevant one seems to be The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin. Or perhaps Doing Nothing by Tom Lutz?
*DING* That must mean it's time for Ekronomics 101 yet again, but I've about run out of the time I want to spend on this reply. If anyone is interested, I might continue later--hopefully within the strict time limits of stories on Slashdot.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Big pharma is only able to overcharge because the FDA creates a virtual monopoly, through its costly and lengthy process at the end of which very few companies are allowed to make a drug.
Remove the "virtual" and "costly and lengthly", substitute "no other" for "very few", and you've described the relevant characteristics of copyright. So it looks to me like the grandfather post is non-hooey.
Try to make an Epi-pen and sell it, it only costs like $30 to make [and patents have expired]
Aside: There is now an approved generic Epi-pen at a more reasonable price. The timing looks like the manufacturer started the development and approval process about the day the price-gouger announced the price hike. The inisible hand strikes as usual, the FDA approval process just delayed it.
I totally agree with the bulk of your post. But I agree completely with its predecessor.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
On the other hand, when support is you main income then you'll do everything you can to make your software complicated and hard to use..
Actually you'll make it easy enough to use to get them hooked before it starts to bite them, and keep the support costs low enough to be perceived as cheaper than switching and incurring learning-curve costs, but high enough to gouge them.
This is the same sort of pricing strategy as that of classic manufactured goods.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Software doesn’t work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce.
Marketing, sales, distribution, support : these activities are not free, they increase with the number of items sold.
Guy notorious for starting shitty company whose only real claim to fame is exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt, aka FUD, and employing anticompetitive and illegal means to reap a theretofore previously undreamt fortune, doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to software. Or economics. His company was and is shit, its fortune stolen from their betters, and he should seriously shut the fuck up before he convinces the last people who do not yet realize he was LUCKY and ruthless, not brilliant, that he is in fact, a dumbass.
Without CHEATING, without breaking laws designed to foster and protect healthy competition, Microsoft would have gone under almost before it got off the ground, you would never have heard of Bill Gates, and he would now be a night janitor at a junior college, bitter AF about his idiotic mistake dropping out rather than finishing his education.
Fuck him and his ignorant opinions. The laws of supply and demand DO apply to software... for example: If someone is selling a piece of software, i.e., an operating system, and no one wants it because it is a piece of dog shit, like for example... every other iteration of Microsoft Windows, there is little to no demand, and the price must be dropped to sell copies. If it is a hideous enough piece of shit, and there is NO price people will pay, you stop selling it because you lose money with every box you ship that gathers dust in perpetuity unsold.
On the other hand, if your OS (or whatever,) is awesome, you can charge real money for it and people will pay, even sometimes when there are cheaper alternatives. Gates does not know this because in his experience, he has never SOLD an operating system that was not a flaming pile of fetid shit.
Gates apparently thinks he has made some earthshaking insight that the fact that there exists a class of product where the majority of capital outlay in its creation is design, means somehow that product is exempt from laws of economics. Maybe his mind is going. The only real observation to be made here is that getting data to the customer has become trivially cheap.
This is only because price per bit transmitted has fallen far faster than inflation. If you wrote an OS, or indeed any piece of software where the amount of data is so large it cannot be supported conventionally, suddenly the laws of supply and demand would VERY much apply again, because in truth, they never STOPPED applying, and Gates is WRONG, and hilariously so.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Why not divide into groups of 100 (or 150 -- Dunbar's number?) then, and have those managed by a hierarchy above them? A cellular design like this mimics the tactics of revolutionary cells.
Alternative Right.
Oracle is making huge amounts of money from my employer by ending support for the version of their product that works and is the foundation for our business processes, and by offering 'newer' versions are deliberately broken products that they can later charge us to 'fix'.
To me as a hobby author writing a novel takes 1-2 years of full spare time dedication
And that's not even factoring in all the other labor-intensives step that must happen before a final book appear (like proof-reading by the publishing company, etc.)
The problem is that readers aren't paying any of these steps directly.
For historical reason, the part where a reader pay, is to get a copy, because for obvious historical reason, that used to a pretty complex and limiting one. You paid a publisher or a distributor to make copy, and that one in turn pays all the other necessary steps that bring the book into life.
The problem is that nowadays (first with printing methods having evolved a lot, and nowadays with e-books where making a new copy is completely trivial), this making a copy and putting it into the hands of the public is about the simplest and cheapest possible.
There's a total disconnect between what you are asked to pay for and what goes behind the scene into a book.
(The same logic applies to any other media)
The market should evolve a way to actually help pay the actual steps requiring work.
Modern patronage over the internet (like patreon, to pay the actual artist working on something, instead of paying for some copies) could play some part in the solution, though it doesn't cover all the situations (small hobby writer. If you don't have a giant reader ship, there's no way to cover your needs through patronage).
the TL;DR: version - the problem is that nowaday you give money for something that cost nothing to do (fetching a copy) and hope that this step will cover the actual costly steps.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What would be really interesting, if the data can be attained , I don't know if it is available, would be to look at actual cost. If you take 30 big software companies, and ask , what kind of profit do they make and when, what are their actual cost ( overhead, employees, help desk etc, including research and loss from products that bomb). What does it actually cost to run a successful software company and what is the minum unit price you could sell successful software at and still break even/ make a 50% profit etc.
I have difficulty believing large corporations and their management have no handle on this problem. Not that it isn't complicated, but just like casino's you have to quantify risk vs rearward and rig the game so you don't go broke.
If the data was available for study , it would make an interesting jumping off point for discussions like copyright law and licensing, because ideally we would optimize the law so that these corporations that do well would make serious profit, but not hold the populous hostage for every last penny that can be squeezed from them for 100 years, like they currently can do.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
When every human on Earth is fed, clothed, sheltered, educated and entertained, THEN you can have this. Until such a time as that, capitalism in this form is absolutely immoral.
I was not passing judgement on capitalism, merely pointing out how it works. It is also not a "form" of capitalism but baked into its very nature. While I agree that, on the surface, this does appear immoral the result is the most efficient form of economy that delivers the most goods and services to people than any other system ever devised. I tend to look at capitalism the same way the Churchill did democracy: "it's the worst form of economy except for all the others that have ever been tried."
What if HR were divided into ten groups of 150 people each? There would be internal competition there, and variation in choices, so no longer a monolithic HR entity.
Alternative Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Casteism