Pure dynamic casts?

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Lutger wrote:
> language_fan wrote:
> 
>> Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:59:06 -0600, Rainer Deyke thusly wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>> Sure, that is the way it works. But still I think the main motivator for
>> customers is the price. It does not really matter if the latest photoshop
>> runs on a Pentium 233MMX or requires a dual-core with 4GB of RAM for e.g.
>> scaling 5MPix images. The target audience upgrades their hardware anyways
>> and the differences between user interfaces is so huge that competition
>> is inexistant. The poorer customers first use a pirated version of
>> photoshop, and only after gaining some popularity buy the licenses rather
>> than use free software like gimp. Optimizing the software will not bring
>> adobe more customers. You can see their optimizing policy in the famous
>> flash plugin and pdf reader. Performance on both programs is just
>> horrible and I could well imagine that a novice programmer built both of
>> them.
> 
> Yet this poor performance annoys people to no end. I don't know a single 
> person who isn't irritated by their PDF bloatware, and all my 'tech-savvy'  
> friends have switched to other PDF readers. Same with IE, I know lots of 
> people switched to firefox just because of performance, and then some 
> switched again to Opera or Chrome because even Firefox is too slow.

I agree with Lutger here, these companies just sit on their success and 
monopoly as excuses to not optimize their software. That and tight 
deadlines on new versions which prevents even the best of programmers to 
properly optimize code. Often when the programmer says "it works, but I 
can get it 10times faster given another week" to his manager, when that 
reaches the top of the corporate chain, the CEO only hears "it works".

These companies are just shooting themselves in the foot in the long 
run. IE is losing the market share it fought so hard to steal. Acrobat 
is used less and less, I myself use it only to print files, I can almost 
always find a text version of a pdf document within seconds. Loading the 
pdf reader is way slower than going back to google and clicking the next 
link.

While a lot of people targeted by these heavy softwares change hardware 
every now and then, they can do so because they make enough from their 
work. Any newcomer or novice just wanting to learn to someday get a job 
in the domain usually has no money to upgrade his old computer.

And yeah, most people will download these programs to learn, and buy 
licenses when they turn professional but not all of them, I see that all 
the time. They would sell way more copies of photoshop if it was 
actually easy to buy.