What choices did you make to get yourself into that position?
What choices can you make now that can get you out of that position?
If you cannot answer these questions and effect positive change for yourself, then by all means yes you deserve to be trapped and abused by your overlords. Enjoy.
They never run out of stuff to add. Give any company enough resources and you would see weird and completely unrelated stuff attached to their products. I kid you not, I can apparently get a vet appointment in a taxi app, and my bank is now selling clothes and.... car parts? While the bank part of the app literally has no option to filter out only incoming transactions. Priorities, I guess...
Yeah companies need to stop being allowed to be multiple industries.
Like why does every department store have a credit card now? They should be using their profits to pay their employees, not loaning it out at insane interest rates.
I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told "there's no need, there's nothing to maintain on it." but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year "because of inflation". It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
I've read your response to others that you bought the replacement outright, but I wonder if the original renter was about to sell their house and needed a water heater. Saddling the future with this debt could be cheaper than buying it outright.
I've since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. For a while I wasn't aware that you could just buy a heater. So I just gritted my teeth and paid up.
But my point was the weird and pointless increase of fees.
I have since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. Sadly a heat pump isn't an option in my home. So it's a simple electric 80liter water heater.
The expensive part of making books is not the paper. My wife is an independent author and between editing, typesetting, cover design, etc. she spent about $1500 to publish each of her books.
While she could price her books at $1, that would present her with a few problems.
Firstly, people often value things based on what they've paid for them, so pricing your book too low makes people assume it is of poor quality.
Secondly, having positive reviews is extremely important for indie authors because the Almighty Algorithm will reward you or punish you based on the book's rating. Other indie authors she has talked to have seen a noticable decline in their book's rating after Amazon put it on sale and a bunch of people who might not have otherwise read it started buying copies. If you've ever worked retail or food service, you probably know that bargain hunters are often the people who are least reasonable and hardest to please. If the book is too cheap, you may attract an audience that harms its reputation.
Finally, trying to sell 2000+ copies of a book is pretty daunting for small authors and that's about what it would take to break even at $1 per copy.
Could big publishers and well known authors sell books for a buck? Probably. But for the majority of authors who aren't making their living by writing and only sell a few hundred copies ever, that's not really realistic.
Those are reasonable statements, but it doesn't explain why the digital equivalents cost MORE than their physical counterparts. Especially considering there's no manufacturing, distribution, shipping, storage, etc.. Sure, servers and bandwidth cost money, but nowhere near what an entire physical distribution chain costs. It's pennies on the dollar.
There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
This is actually the reason why taxes don't increase luxury item costs as the cost is set to the market demand rather than from supply. In fact, the benefits from taxes help people afford more products in a virtuous cycle. It's also the reason tariffs or taxes on raw goods are so bad as you actually are creating dead weight loss and driving down demand which can be useful or detrimental depending on why someone needs that product.
Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a "move fast and break things" environment where you build so much technical debt that you can't touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don't have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I've ever written)
It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That's part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of "fictitious capital" as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the "how much does it cost to make a coat" chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
The problem (outside of competence and the fact that most people only really understand one tool) is that they're deliberately architected in ways that make it difficult to operate on them the same way. They're not just different function calls; they want you to make completely different assumptions about how to do things.
This is kinda flawed. Most businesses need to recoup their investment, and some upfront costs going away is part of the plan to profitability.
I think this guy is confusing all "software businesses" and fortune 100 tech companies.
Edit: there are ton of businesses that make software, don't become unicorns or make billions, that survive on a product suiting some niche. To say "software companies" take crazy margins is stupid. Big tech is the issue, not software (see linux)
The markets jumped 30% this year alone, even in the face of a higher than recently normal interest rate.
The problem isn't recoupment of losses, it's an expectation of skyrocketing future growth.
The end result is a lending market chasing unicorns, quarter after quarter, as businesses promising increasingly ludicrous returns to lure those investors in.
Youre describing the fortune 100 tech companies, as I said.
Plenty of smaller startups survived, still develop, support and improve their software very far from everything you're describing here. Should maintainers be paid less and less as the project ages?
Software shouldn't get cheaper as it ages. Big tech companies should stop milking monopolies off tax payer funds. It has nothing to do with the cost / lifecycle of software
Software dev is still laughably less costly than hardware dev. And when done your cost drops to zero while hardware has the whole supply chain struggle indefinitely. Big (software) tech has profit margins beyond 30% for a reason.
This isn't true at all. Software ages, you need to make it better to keep up with new shit. This isn't a software issue, it's a big tech/monopoly issue. Youre talking about big tech companies.
Other software exists, it's not just Instagram and tiktok.