Rob Kohr

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since February 27, 2006

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February 27, 2006, on Software Pricing:
The problem is that you are introducing a middle man, a consortium, which adds a cost on the supply chain:
programmer - middleman - consumer
The more efficient economic model would be for the programmer to charge the consumer directly for services. I think we are starting to see that today with the growth of web based applications. With this, the user can be charged directly for services, and this could be based upon whatever sales model the programmer decides is best.
I probably have a slightly biased opinion towards this as I run two systems based upon this model, a flash card system and a collaborative system where primarily I make a little tiny amount of money on ads and small services, and spread them along a large user base. This has worked out fairly well, since there are no transaction costs for the user, and the only application they have to keep up to date is their browser.