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> In a world of fully general app sandboxes, you can switch out your hardware and OS at any time without disrupting your life or business. Therefore those are c
by fipar 7y ago
> In a world of fully general app sandboxes, you can switch out your hardware and OS at any time without disrupting your life or business. Therefore those are commoditized, and their price drops to the marginal cost of production - which for software is zero.
I think software's marginal cost of production is zero only if no updates/fixes are ever needed. I know it sounds like nitpicking but just think of all the vulnerabilities discovered, specially the closer software gets to the lower end of the stack. Even if an OS could suddenly stop adding features and still be viable in the market, the cost of patching it as holes are discovered is certainly not zero.
- thinkloop 7y agoThe zero mainly comes from the ability to scale for free. Sure it costs a few million bucks to maintain Linux (or whatever), but when divided by billions of copies the per unit cost becomes effectively zero.
- pjc50 7y agoThat's not a marginal cost of production, though. It costs almost the same to fix a bug if you have one user or a billion users. It certainly is a real cost that has encouraged software vendors to move from "box" sales (which became tricky when we gave up on boxes) to annual licenses and/or SaaS. But it's not a marginal cost.