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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> users don’t generally pay for the marginal value of a less buggy app

Do they get the choice to?

It's not like I can get a less buggy version of MS Windows by paying an extra $20.

And while many open source projects accept donations, and many enterprise products offer support contracts, it's not like $20 gets you a guaranteed bug fix.

I agree with your point that companies don't always have a good business case to produce quality software - but we can hardly blame customers for not buying things we aren't selling :)

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> Do they get the choice to?

Yes. At least somewhat. There's a reason lots of competing products become popular, e.g. Google Sheets taking some of the popularity of Excel. New features like live sync actually matter. And to the extent that users actually care about quality, software with better quality will evenutally also win.

I mean, I'm using an iPhone. I'm using a Mac. I'm paying a huge premium over someone on Android and Windows. I do it largely for the quality of the Apple ecosystem.

But yes, there are still problems. The world of products is hard. :)

Of course $20 doesn't get you a bug fix, it costs a few orders of magnitude more to actually implement it.

For an open source project, consider what it would cost to hire a contractor to implement the fix and get it to a state where the fix would be accepted by the project.

Quite a bit more than $20, but the option to pay more for Apple products and get a better experience has always been there. I don't want to come across as a shill or anything, of course Apple has made blunders and many people have always been locked into Windows. But it does seem relevant, that despite network effects and lock-in, they've been able to provide an alternative ecosystem all these years primarily by having slightly-less-worse products that people are willing to pay a premium for.

If the customers are still buying it, it can't be that bad can it. Yeah I'm a bit sarcastic too, but I'm convinced the reasoning is similar - if it kinda works throw it at people and move to building the next shiny facade. Quality is simply not directly translatable to money, so we're living with this half-baked everything. And I'm not blaming the developers, they produce exactly what they're asked and fix only the bugs they're assigned.

> If the customers are still buying it

In a lot of cases, the customers aren't buying it, it's "free" (the cost being not monetary but elsewhere) and no new entrants can compete with the giant piles of cash the incumbents are sitting on

You do get the choice, in the form of moving to another piece of ostensibly less buggy software or not using the service at all.

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