PDA

View Full Version : Are softwares in the market worth for its huge price tags?



jeyaganesh
August 28th, 2007, 08:13 PM
I saw many of the softwares like MS Office, Adobe Products, Final cut, etc are selling for huge money in the market. I am wondering that that much money is needed to produce those softwares? Are they really worth for such a huge price tag? I would like to hear about this from some professional software developers here.
:guitar:

raijinsetsu
August 28th, 2007, 08:15 PM
Some of them are... Some of them aren't. Adobe has become an industry standard. MS is an industry sub-standard, and not worth a dime.
You really have to take it package by package.

mech7
August 28th, 2007, 09:18 PM
Yes

djroze
August 28th, 2007, 09:20 PM
That's basically the golden question of open source software, isn't it? ;) While you can compare the features of commercial software to open source and say "software package xyz has all the features of package abc, but xyz is open source (free) and abc costs $300", that only takes into account the acquisition price of the software. Open source software is free for the end user to obtain, but one has to take into account the time invested in getting it installed/running/working like the commercial software (that is, it's not free to own). Of course commercial software is plagued with its own time-siphoning overhead, but I would dare say this overhead is on average noticeably greater in open source software.

That being said, there is certainly a lot of open source software that offers comparable features and often better stability than commercial stuff, without the high price tag. And the "cost of ownership" is often drastically diminished if you're reasonably familiar with computing basics and have been introduced to your friend, Google. :)

edit: I guess I've answered a slightly different question (open source vs. commercial), but what is the alternative to paying big bucks for robust software? ;)

jeyaganesh
August 29th, 2007, 12:39 AM
Now I am using Open Office. It has all quality as like MS Office 2007. In commercial softwares, the outlook and finishing is good and attractive than open source softwares. I cant say this for all open source softwares. Ubuntu is an excellent OS with attractive outlook. I personally enjoy Beryl which provides unbeatable visual retreat and live screen environment. Best thing in Open Office is I could save the word files as MS Word 97 compatible format that I can use in my working place. It also has PDF file converting facility.

Teh Dust
August 29th, 2007, 01:38 AM
iWork 08 is worth the $75. I love keynote.

Mogurijin
August 29th, 2007, 01:45 AM
I find most the time products aren't worth the price tag, but I'm not a profession software developer. The latest office costs at least $300. And OpenOffice is free. Also, I saw a program the other day that lets you convert Word documents into pdf files for around $100. And I was sitting there thinking my free OpenOffice already does that ^^.

samjh
August 29th, 2007, 02:01 AM
If 20 programmers paid at an average of US$50,000 per annum worked for 2 years on an office suite, that's US$2,000,000 on programmer salary alone.

A one-month print advertisement on a popular computing magazine can easily cost more than $10,000. Spread that to around five magazines, over a period of maybe six months, and then add the cost of advertisement design, and you're looking at over $300,000.

CDs need to be printed, or even for downloaded software, server and bandwidth cost money. Then they need to be shipped to whole-salers, and then to retailers. Whole-salers take their share of money, and the retailers take their cut as well.

Publishers of the software want money too. They take a fair chunk of the sales revenue.

So for a 2-year development period, followed by 6-months of sales, you're looking at nearly US$3,000,000. At the end of it all, the software developer needs to produce enough profit to: support itself, pay its employees, and fund the development of the next version of their software and/or new products.

When all is said and done, the developer might make only a couple of dollars for each copy of their software. Fine for companies like Microsoft with sales running into tens of millions per product suite over 3-5 years, but not so good for companies operating in niche markets such as Alias (creators of the Maya 3D graphics suite), who would struggle to crack even just one-million sales for all their product line.


With Open Source software, most highly successful, commercially competitive software have corporate or venture-capital backing. Look at Suse, Fedora, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Mono, Java, OpenSolaris, and of course Ubuntu itself.
The ones without such backing usually take much longer than commercial software to have the same level of functionality, reliability, and usability. Just look at projects like Anjuta, Codeblocks, Netbeans, Blender, and the Linux kernel. Netbeans and Blender were commercial projects in the beginning, but development slowed immensely after going open-source, and it's taken them more than three years to begin to approach their commercial counterparts. Anjuta and Codeblocks have been in the works for years, yet neither of them can compete with something like Microsoft Visual Studio in large-scale development environments. The Linux kernel, while technically good, was nowhere near as usable as Microsoft Windows or MacOS until around year 2000, when Redhat began popularising Linux for enterprises.

jrusso2
August 29th, 2007, 02:06 AM
Personally I don't think any of them are worth the high price they charge for stuff like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Microsoft Office and Vista.

I prefer to use free substitutes.

I would probably buy Photoshop if I needed it, but only if the price was not greater then $100.

Thats about my limit to buying software.

goumples
August 29th, 2007, 02:22 AM
Software isn't worth 2 cents. I'll never pay for it again, ever.

raijinsetsu
August 30th, 2007, 07:41 PM
Software isn't worth 2 cents. I'll never pay for it again, ever.

That's an over generalization... There are many products out there that are worth every dime, to the right person. Maya (valued at just under $7k on the autodesk site) is very worth it for 3D developers looking for a comprehensive suite. Not everyone will want to pay this, but for some modelers and studios, it's a requirement.
The same goes for Photoshop. Personally, I think GIMP is a fully functional alternative, but I've heard some people (mostly artists and graphics designers) who say they NEED Photoshop. I never used any of the higher functionality of PS, so I can't tell you any more about it...

I've purchased a lot of computer software. Some of the cheapest titles have been the best, while some of the more expensive have been crap. But, you can't apply this to every package. There is no $$ to value conversion formula that will fit all software packages.

Whether or not it's worth it, is up to your own perspective.