Pure dynamic casts?

[language_fan]

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.