Are you blind to a great bargain?
Here’s a column that I can really relate to, and a topic that I’ve written about more than once before.
“Computers would be nothing without programs to run on them, so why do we spend so much time drooling over our hardware — physical bits and pieces — and so little over the software that makes the bits and pieces do what we want them to? And why are we so stingy about paying for software?” (from Blind to Bargains, Loose Wire)
Read the whole article, it’s pretty interesting.
I couldn’t see anything at the WSJ (just a blank page), but I think one reason people value hardware more than software (unless they really think it through carefully) is the reason that people value physical things they can see and touch over abstractions: evolution has selected for that.
In the computer world though, conditioning has something to do with it too: there is tons of high-quality free software out there, but how often do you see free hardware? Given that such is the case, we would expect expectations relating to software to change much more than those relating to hardware.
It must be pretty frustrating though if you’re in the business of trying to put physical stuff like food on your ‘plate’ by writing non-physical stuff like software though
Comment by anon — April 27, 2007 @ 5:10 pm