Commercial software – worth the price?

Yesterday I came across an old topic in The Force Field forums about an incident in which a particular software vendor released an upgrade that caused an issue for a reseller. I responded to the post sympathetic towards the reseller and somewhat critical of the software industry in general.

I wasn’t targeting the specific application, in fact soon after this story broke they rectified the issue and as far as I know all has been well since.

I was merely using the incident as an example of how the software industry as a whole has
overcharged and underdelivered since the early days and how we as consumers and users have
been conditioned to just accept it as The Way Things Should Be.

I believe this conditioning began back in the early 80’s when the personal computer existed in the
form of the Atari, Tandy, Commodore, Apple and IBM PCs. Software was often home-grown by startup software companies and sold on cassette tapes and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks in cheap packaging and poorly written instruction sheets. Applications, utilities and games were oftenwritten mostly in BASIC with ASCII or low res graphics, barely ran without crashing and were sold for a premium simply because most users didn’t have the time or patience to write the programs themselves.

I remember I purchased an accounting program for my Commodore PET computer once on a
cassette tape that cost about $20. The program was so full of bugs it was basically useless. In
those days the software was not always compiled in machine language and you could often break the program from running and go through the code to fix it yourself, which is what some did.

Of course, if it didn’t work, you would return it. Because it could be easily copied, this quickly
became a nightmare for software resellers. However, instead of improving the quality of the product
before it went on sale, software vendors simply put a stop to accepting returns.

There was some quality stuff out there, but it was overshadowed by a plethora of junk. In time,
users began to get a clue and started writing their own programs which they freely distributed on
bulletin board systems (before Al Gore allegedly helped invent the Internet) and in user groups. There was also the free and illegal distribution of commercial software, some of which users felt was usable but not worth buying for one reason or another. This divided software into four basic types, freeware, shareware, commercial software and warez (pirated commercial software).

Some of the free user-created programs were quite good; so good, in fact, it put some of their
commercial counterparts to shame. That didn’t deter the commercial software companies.

The commercial vendors already had control over the terms of sale and use in the commercial market. To curb the piracy they began to require licensing agreements and further raised the price of the software – but not necessarily the quality.

Thirty years later nothing has changed. The software industry still takes us to the cleaners. Why?
Because they can.

A whole generation of users were born and raised on crappy software, crappy service, crappy
support on crappy terms at crappy prices. It’s all they experienced. It’s all they know. To these
users it is The Way Things Are because it is The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. But it isn’t. Yet
it is, because they let it be.

Don’t get me wrong. There is commercial software that is worth the price – every penny. Some of it
is quite excellent. There is also a lot of it sitting on my shelf that I paid a lot more for and was not
worth half. Yet the software vendor wants to to fix it with an upgrade for a fee. That is simply
unacceptable.

The software industry is the only industry I can think of that can get away with selling something
that can have serious flaws, can and often will charge you more money for new and improved
versions to fix those flaws (while sometimes introducing new flaws), maintains complete control over the product after you purchase it, tells you how you can and can’t use it, locks you and whatever
you create into it so that you must use their product to access what you create with it and own, does not warranty the product, sells you something intangible that you do not actually own, forces you to agree to and sign a one sided legal document in their favor AFTER you paid for it but before you can use it and overcharges for the entire experience with no refunds.

In any other industry this would be called a scam. In the commercial software industry it’s just
accepted business practice.

The worst part of it all is, as consumers, we expect it and because we expect it, we let them do it,
because it meets our expectations- and we pay the price.