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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

Apply this to software, and everybody will be forced to pay the Office Pro price when they only need Office Home features.

For a certain price, you can buy an Intel CPU with certain known features. For a higher price, you get more features.

This is a concept that’s used in many product classes. The fact that it’s also done for HW is just an irrelevant detail.

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The only reason this works is that it's backed up by government enforcement of intellectual property rights. If the government didn't do that, then consumers wouldn't pay anything for office software, Microsoft Office wouldn't exist, and the whole landscape would be very different. The natural price for the second copy of a piece of software is $0.

Something being known and taught in product classes doesn't make it any more acceptable. Planned obsolescence is taught in economics classes, and it's still awful despite that.

> Microsoft Office wouldn't exist

I believe you're wrong. It would absolutely exist, either in cloud form, or as a rented screen-time service before that.

Productivity (and other) software has a real economic value, it's not a movie you can skip and lose nothing.

Similarly, if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bike.

I don’t see the point in discussing lala land hypotheticals.

Is the marginal cost of providing a copy of software really $0, or does the marginal user ask questions, have feature requests, uncover bugs with new usage patterns, ...? Does that non-zero marginal cost vary with the features included in the software? Isn't support a major part of most software product differentiation strategies?

That's true, and that's continuous labor. However, it's also possible for software to come with no support too (e.g. abandoned games). As software developers, we care that our labor is paid for, but there's no reason there should be some kind of eternal dividend for doing nothing. Nor should there be for bushiness people generally.

Which is why intellectual property rights are time-limited? One can make a strong argument those rights are protected for _too much_ time, and the length of that restriction can be attributed to regulatory capture. But the remedy is shorter copyright terms and patent exclusivity periods, or higher costs to maintain protections (like property taxes on real property), not abolition of intellectual property as a concept.

Given that most are pushed into the yearly SaaS subscription instead of the more expensive one time Home license, that is already here, no need for future tense.

> Apply this to software, and everybody will be forced to pay the Office Pro price when they only need Office Home features.

Or rather Microsoft makes less money producing pretty much the same products and selling close to the lower price, which is more likely, since their margin is high enough to allow it.

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