Coolvibe's digital moshpit

Do you know what a copy of Photoshop costs? Or what you have to pay for MS Office, or even for MS Windows? Most people don’t much notice the latter two, since they usually get bundled when they receive their machine from work, and the OS usually gets bundled with new PC’s, which hides the cost, but it is still being paid.

This is a very old model. and one that business thrived on for many years. But now, the game has changed. Nowadays, there are very low cost and free alternatives available. So why is software still so expensive? It’s like they are begging to be pirated. With low-cost software, it’s less of an issue.

To make this more glaringly obvious, let’s look at the prices of some popular products from some popular companies.

A good example is MS Office. Everyone knows it, and it’s one of the most pirated software around. If you buy MS Office legally, it will set you back round €500. There is another product out there called OpenOffice, which has the same functionality, but a way better price, namely free. It’s not the only example out there. A lot of commercial software is horribly overpriced. Similar comparisons can be made with MS Windows vs. Linux, Photoshop vs. GIMP or Krita Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape.

So, there are cheap and free alternatievs available for all that commercial stuff. Sure, the commercial apps may be a lot better, but people usually don’t have unlimited budgets. If companies want to be able to market their software a lot wider, they should seriously drop the prices by a lot. Or maybe give the software away for free for personal use, but charge for support. I’m not saying open sourcing it, because that may be impossible because of licensing agreements between companies.

Some companies use unfair tactics, like Microsoft. They strong-arm OEMs to bundle their OS with the hardware the OEM sells. Even if you don’t want that stuff from Redmond, you are stuck with it. Sure, you can remove it and run something else, but you still paid for it. A copy of Windows Vista Home Premium will set you back about €215 if you buy it from the store. Okay, the OEMs probably get it for a somewhat lower price, but it is not far off. Do you want to pay for something you might not use?

I would have less of a problem with this if the OS was dirt-cheap (like maybe €20  or somesuch), but alas.  But thankfully there are alternatives. It doesn’t take away that software is needlessly expensive, and if companies want to survive in this day and age, they should get off their damn high horse and tone the costs down quite a bit.

And don’t get me started on availability of commercial software if you order it online. Maybe that’s a different blog-post.

Tags: commercial apps, commercial software, functionality, licensing agreements, linkedin, old model, personal use, popular products, software, unfair tactics