Pure dynamic casts?

Rainer Deyke rainerd at eldwood.com
Fri Sep 25 16:59:06 PDT 2009


language_fan wrote:
> I do not believe the market works this way. According to that logic 
> popularity correlates with expenses. So if you have e.g. 1 billion users, 
> even $1 in per-user hardware costs causes a billion dollar losses to 
> customers. Is that unacceptable? On the other hand a program with a 
> userbase of 10 might require a $100 hw upgrade and it is still ok?

If you manage to sell a billion copies of your program, you can
certainly afford to spend some extra time on optimizations and reach
maybe another million users (which would be only 0.1% of your total user
base, but a huge amount of money in absolute sales).  If you're serving
a vertical market of only 10, then your program is probably so expensive
that another $1000 for hardware upgrades is peanuts.  So yes, that's the
way it works.

> A used 2.5 GHz Athlon XP with 1GB of RAM and 100GB of disk costs about 
> $100. Anything below that is obsolete these days. Good luck selling 
> anything to people who use older computers, they are probably broke 
> anyways. Otherwise I just see it cheaper to build your apps slower and 
> require hardware updates. Just imagine - a highly optimized $400 program 
> is way too expensive for most users, a $50 program + $200 hw upgrade 
> sounds just fine.

If you just pull numbers of your ass, you can prove anything.

Software is priced to optimize total income, which is net income per
unit times number of units sold.  Production costs are not factored in
at all.  So the real question is if your $50 software package sells
enough additional units to make up for the increase in production costs.

Competent programmers write reasonably efficient code from the start,
and can take maybe another 10% of the development time to optimize the
code to the point of diminishing returns.  If you have competent
programmers, your 8x price increase almost an order of magnitude off.

Incompetent programmers don't just write slow code, they write buggy,
non-reusable code.  If you're using incompetent programmers, you're
probably wasting more money on management than it would have cost to
hire competent programmers in the first place.


-- 
Rainer Deyke - rainerd at eldwood.com



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