You have been saying how you're been harvesting recently (corn I think?) and making bank so you can buy yourself a new lathe. Now do you really need a new new lathe? Couldn't your harvesting job be done for less money by someone who is struggling to keep a roof over their head or to feed their family? Same situation.
What drives Microsoft to develop and support new product - spoiler alert - it's money. Yes, they make a lot of money, and they pay a decent amount of tax and employ a lot of people. Every one of those employees is also paying tax on their wages and supporting the economy by spending their high salaries on nice toys. Millions of companies make a lot more (in total) than Microsoft does, using their products. Money makes the world go round. This Covid thing shows just how much society depends on people spending their money and not sitting on it.
So again, where's the problem with companies charging what their product is worth? The market sets the price (at least in theory) and I haven't seen too many people complaining about the high cost of professional software like Solidworks (thousands per year) yet there is so much debate about Autodesk offering free access to a high-end product. These companies owe us nothing at all and this entire discussion seems very weird to me.
Al,
These are valid points, but it's "complicated". The software price debate is pretty old and it's somewhat of a religious war, so I don't tink you or I can change too many minds, but let me add some perspective:
For full disclosure, I currently work for the largest cloud platform providers. For the last 20 or so years I worked at various software companies, 7 of which were for a SaaS company (cloud-based software). I use (at work and at home) a mix of free, open-source, and paid software, and with software "you get what you paid for" is very true, with one caveat that it's often more of "you get what someone paid for". Many successful open source projects are very heavily financed and staffed by commercial companies. I know many people on Intel's Linux kernel development team; my employer has their own version of Linux and contributes heavily to Linux source and so does Microsoft with hundreds of people contributing code to Linux. The same goes for many other projects. On the other hand, many "hobby" projects stay in "Alpha" for decades (Inkscape is close to my heart right now). They work OK-ish, but not anywhere near what their commercial competitors do. There is nothin open-source that touches Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Visual Studio, Fusion 360, Altium, or you name it. Developing that software takes a LOT of VERY expensive software engineers.
For perspective; at this point, I sunk over 4,000 hours into TouchDRO (my "hobby project"), and that thing is a "minnow" compared to Fusion 360. In the USA a fully burdened [average] software engineer costs >$100 per hour, so do the math. The whole thing about off-shore development is again, "complicated". Low-end stuff like drivers, basic apps, etc. can be done off-shore; MS, Amazon, Adobe, Intel, IBM have tens of thousands of engineers in developed countries (take a wall on MS campus or look at Amazons HQ in Seattle; they are huge). Autodesk is local to me, so I know several people there too (including the guy who invented the Inventor), and they have many-many engineers in the states (in Oregon, Cali, etc.)
In this case, it makes sense that Autodesk wants to get an ROI on their investment. To be fair, before they made Fusion360 free for personal use, there was NOTHING on the market that could touch it and didn't cost an arm and a leg. Where it gets hairy is that making it free, they killed off any [potential] competition, so an argument can be made that this is anti-competitive behavior. Closer to my heart, I've been Eagle user for more than a decade. It used to cost $200 for my version to outright own it. Then Autodesk changed it to $100 per year subscription for basic version; this year they killed it. Fortunately for now I am grandfathered into that price, but if they change their mind, I will be paying over $400. Again, this is within their rights, but it really suck for me personally.
Now, as far as Cloud-based software: in principle, this is a really good idea, and there are examples where the model has huge advantages, especially for the enterprise. If you take into account the cost of local IT, servers, etc. it makes sense to move to a cloud-based system, where you get benefits of the scale (your instance can share hardware with others, so you are not paying for idle capacity.; if done right, you get elastic scalability, continuous updates, etc. For consumers this can work well too. I actually love Adobe's new pricing model. I used to dump over $1000 for Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator every 2-3 years. Now I pay $20 per month for the two apps that I use. Same with Office 365, but with the benefit of having access to all my Office Apps and files from anywhere in the world. At this point, I can throw my laptop out of the window, buy a new one and be back in business the same day.
The thing goes sideways when a company gets greedy once they lock in enough customers and jacks up the price. My former employer pulled that stunt a few years ago - they offered highest tier for under $100K/year, then got acuired by a private equity group and tripled the price for all renevals. Since data migration out was insanely expensive and lengthy (we handled hundreds of terbaytes of documents for some customers), they basically got screwed one way or the other.
Bottom line: this while situation has many ideas and it's a lot more nuanced. Needless to say, we live in a capitalist society (and most of us enjoy that fact), so this is basic economics at work.
Regards
Yuriy
P.S. Wow, I think this is my longest post every. Sorry about that; I threw away a few paragraphs, but still pretty long.
