First let me explain why I wrote the original posts. Apart from certain projects on a massive scale that I’m very impressed by (e.g. Amazon DB), the world of software seems very drab to me. Not only do updates add little value, for plenty of software the value in everyday productivity is questionable.

Whether or not a product is a commodity, depends on several factors aligned on two dimensions, I think: production & consumption. On the production-side, we have labour, tools, and distribution. More and more is becoming automised, less skills are needed (this point is debatable) to produce software, and distribution-costs are minimal. It is very easy to see how the production of software is become trivialised.

On the consumption-side, we have three phenomena that are quite telling: bundling, piracy, and open source. When was the last time that you bought a PC without an OS? Would people upgrade to a new OS without a new PC? Some would, but that brings us to a second phenomenon: piracy. It’s pretty safe to say that the majority of consumer-software is pirated. It would suggest that customers attribute little value, apart from the legal kind, to software. And there’s open source, which for some incalculable reason has produced free alternative to most consumer-software.

That people are not paying (or paying less) for software should have two consequences for producers: a. that producers will work hard on their copy-protection (good luck with that) and lobby politicians for legal protection (on a global scale? good luck with that also). And b. that producers will have to push the cost of production down. There is a pressure to automise more and more, build on existing framework and fill in the rest with real or artificial code-monkeys.

I think that were more innovation must happen is in integrating software and hardware solutions into real life. You speak of paper, but I can do way more with a piece of paper than I could ever do with the blank canvas of a word-processor or a paint-program.

The problem with my vision is that it is expensive and complicated. And it is expensive and complicated because it is high-tech.

More on this in a few weeks when I’m back on the clock.