The effect of piracy on price?

[excalibur2]

***"Anyone of you who is without sin can throw the first stone".

Yes, I know what you mean. The thing is, I don't need pirate software. The firewalls I use are easily available in pirate 'Pro' form, but I use the free version. I've several machines here running XP Pro, all on legit licences. Several more running Win 2000, including Server - again legit. I'm currently using Office 2000 (legit), despite much more recent versions being easily available. I've had every version of Photoshop since v3 - legit again. And so on. I don't install the latest version of everything (like Office) just because I could get it. For what I do, I don't need the latest and greatest. So if the old tool does the job, I'm perfectly content to stick with it.***

Well I'm not suggesting that you are not honest, but you can get some guys who take a stance on what is right and wrong, yet for example think nothing of fiddling the government of taxes.
We all know about the hypocrisy of politicians are ordinary people any different.

[Akira]

I try not to but pirate music and my iPod is poulated with music I have paid for. Music is a wonderful thing and I don't want to rip off the people who give me so much pleasure.

I don't pirate movies because I love the visual multimdia arts etc. and I'd hate the movie making industry to suffer too much because of piracy. My 300+ DVD collection is, I'm proud to say, 100% original.

I have a collection of electronic 'books' e.g. classical collections, religious texts etc. I do think this kind of knowledge should be freely distributible as the originators are loooong gone. I wouldn't say the same applies too living authors' work though.

I've used pirated software and I've not liked it as I know the hard work that goes into behemoths like MS OSs... I know simply try to use free software that doesn't make me feel like I'm stealing!

With this I'm using Open Office and endeavouring to learn more about Linux in order to make this my primary OS. I tend to save for things I want in live (like loads of CDs and Music) and if I don't have the cash (which is often the case) I don't have it.

The anonymous nature of piracy is clearly a factor here (as others have said) as I'm certain most folks who rip loads of MP3 files off the net wouldn't walk into HMV and do the same.

Thanks for a great forum - Hexus Rocks!

[Saracen]

Saracen: I have already said you are right about piracy and there is no argument against what you say, unfortunately like a vicar preaching in church, the congregation don't always do what he preaches.......and in fact some of the vicars are hypocrites and are just as bad or worse as the congregation.

Yes, some people are.

I don't pretend to be a saint, but just because I don't agree with piracy and am prepared to argue against it in a debate doesn't mean I'm preaching. I'm not trying to convert anybody, and I'm not expecting anybody to change their mind. But this is a debate forum, so it's incumbent on people to express their view. It's just unrealistic to expect others to agree .... and it'd be boring as hell if they always did.

But If you are short of money in 1993 ish and a friend offers you a copy of WP3.1, how many people would refuse it, well I know you would but what about the others.

Not many would refuse, I suspect. But it doesn't change the argument that there were alternatives that were FAR cheaper, and that would do the vast bulk of what non-business users would require. And that is what destroys the argument you opened with, which was about rip-off pricing as a justification. It isn't a justification, because there were alternatives available that were far cheaper, and because not being able to afford the Rolls Royce solution is not a justification for taking it. You could have done your two letters a month on Sprint IF the price of WP3.1 had been the problem.

So pirate it if that's what you want to do. But to then blame it on WPs pricing policy is hypocrisy.

As for WP3.1 prices, you seem to be quite happy agreeing with the haves and have nots........Wordperfect couldn't give a fig about joe public, so instead of bringing out a cheap "cut down" ver for ordinary people all they did is encourage piracy.

WP are a business, not a social service. They're there to make a profit, and are under no obligation, whether moral, ethical or legal, to have to produce products for markets they don't address. Other companies were adddressing those markets! What you're saying is that Ferrari should be producing a "cut-down" version because Joe Public can't afford the full-blown thing. How about a £5,000 Aston Martin? These compnaies pick their target market and produce a product for it .... just as WordPerfect Corp did.

And the fact that there were several other companies, like Borland, producing those "cut-down" products, but you STILL pirated WP3.1 rather suggests that if there'd been a cut-down version of WP3.1, you'd still have ignored that as well, because you wanted 3.1.

Well fine, you got what you wanted, but don't blame it on WP for not producing what you wanted, which was a top-end product at bargain-basement prices. If they'd produced a top-end product at bargain prices, don't you think a lot of their corporate customers would have said "Wow" .... and bought that instead of the top-end product?

Lots of companies target specific markets. Look at Ford. They produce different brands of car for different markets - Ford, Mercury, Lincoln. And they target the Lincoln brand at Cadillac buyers, not at the mass market.

But not every company has the resources of a Ford, to target every market. If WP decide they're going to produce a cut-down version, they risk competing with their own top-end product, and they have to dedicate resources to producing that cut-down version. That means they either have to take resources off the development of their top-end products, or they have to recruit more people. Either way, there's a cost to doing it. You may find that they would have had to have leased more premises to be able to accomodate the extra staff, who knows. Without knowing that underlying cost structure, it's impossible to tell what kind of margin WP could have taken on a 'low-end' product.

So why the hell should WP Corp bring out a low-end version? That's not the market they serve, just as it isn't Ferrari's or Aston Martin's. You seem to think they have some kind of a duty to provide product for "Joe Public", just because Jow Public might aspire to their product. Well, they don't.

And to suggest they they should, and that the fact that they don't is justification for piracy or "encouraging piracy" is exactly the kind of self-serving rationalisation that I've been objecting to, for the reason Directhex so eloquently stated.

[excalibur2]

***But it doesn't change the argument that there were alternatives that were FAR cheaper, and that would do the vast bulk of what non-business users would require. And that is what destroys the argument you opened with, which was about rip-off pricing as a justification. It isn't a justification, because there were alternatives available that were far cheaper***

Well I didn't find any free ones, that were much good in comparison to WP3.1..... and I wasn't prepared to pay even £50 to do a few letters now and again, but later on thought sharing the cost of buying AmiPro for £30 each was reasonable and used it for years.
IIRC all the other dos products to WP only gave draft printing and didn't have a decent UK English spell checker, and as I said no way was I prepared to pay £100s for WP3.1 and didn't bother to go out of my way to get it, but when it's offered to you on a plate........................

***And to suggest they they should, and that the fact that they don't is justification for piracy or "encouraging piracy" is exactly the kind of self-serving rationalisation that I've been objecting to, for the reason Directhex so eloquently stated.***

Why there is no argument against theft, there is an argument more centred around the psychology and philosophy of joe public over the last say 40 years..........joe public just want what others have, it's as simple as that.....crimes from piracy to financial swindles must run into millions of incidents/year

[Saracen]

Well I didn't find any free ones, that were much good in comparison to WP3.1..... and I wasn't prepared to pay even £50 to do a few letters now and again, but later on thought sharing the cost of buying AmiPro for £30 each was reasonable and used it for years.

But that's exactly the point I was making, right from the first post where I quoted you. It wasn't that you pirated it that I picked up on, but the reasons you gave, which was largely that it was a "rip-off" price. If you weren't prepared to pay even £50, then just how cheap did you think WP 3.1 ought to have been for it not to be a "rip-off"?

That's why I keep calling it things like "self-justification" .... because the way it reads to me is that calling it a rip-off is a way of excusing pirating it.

If you paid £30, but wasn't prepared to pay £50, then I can't see any conceivable way WP Corp were going to be able to get the price anywhere near to what you wouldn't have considered rip-off.

But my comments weren't even specifically about you. You paid £30 ... yet people pirate films that cost £15-£20 on the High Street, and again, an oft-used excuse is "rip-off" pricing. My objection to that phrase there is exactly the same - unless you know the costs behind the product, and the profit, there's no way to be sure what is highly profitable and what is barely profitable or even loss-making, let alone what's a rip-off.

What is absolutely certain is that "rip-off" doesn't equate to expensive, and nor does it relate to what a given individual can or can't afford. "Rip-off" is a pejorative term with implications of dishonesty, swindling, fraud or outright theft. Just because something is expensive doesn't mean it's a rip-off.

Why there is no argument against theft, there is an argument more centred around the psychology and philosophy of joe public over the last say 40 years..........joe public just want what others have, it's as simple as that.....crimes from piracy to financial swindles must run into millions of incidents/year

I'm not sure I understand your first point. I can't see how that comment about theft relates to the remark of mine that you quoted. Could you explain it for me, please?

My point about company operations was :-

• they are in business to make money. That's their explicit objective. To be clear, the people in companies that make operational decisions (the directors) are employees who's job is to run the company profitably, not to provide whatever the public thinks it wants
  
  
• most companies don't have the resources to provide all things to all people, so they specialise. The more successful they are, the more products/services they can provide, and to more market sectors but they are required to do so profitably, unless the OWNERS have defined different ojectives.
  
  
• they aren't social service departments or charities.
  
  
• if a director decides to put providing software for the masses ahead of company profitability, he's likely to find himself on the unemployment lists, and perhaps getting sued, because he owes a duty to operate inside the guidelines set out for him.

So it's perfectly feasible for a company's owners to decide that profit isn't the objective, and that they'll run as a non-profit-making company, but unless the owners and directors are the same people and in a large company they usually aren't (though directors may be part-owners) then even running at break-even isn't the idea.

Given that, a company like WP Corp offers a product to the market. Nobody has to buy it. But, if you want it, you have to decide if it's worth the price to you. If it is, you buy. If it isn't, you don't. That applies to a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a new suit, a computer, a car, a house or a piece of software. If that software provides top-end facilities aimed at the business buyer, perhaps even at major corporations and not even small or medium-sized businesses, because that's the market the company is aiming for, then it doesn't make their product a rip-off it's it's priced out of reach of others.

It also means that by targetting certain types of buyers through their pricing strategy, WP Corp created a market for other companies, like Borland, to step in with products that were aimed at lower-end markets, but perhaps offered less facilities, inferior quality, skimpy documentation, less support or a slower product development schedule.

Yes, people want what others have, exactly as you said in your last post. But that doesn't mean their entitled to it, or that prices were a rip-off, or that you've been forced into it. It jusat means you and they wanted it, and pirated it because you could. Which is what directhex and I, and others, having been saying for several pages, and that the rip-off pricing etc is an excuse not a reason or justification.


One more point about companies. Some years ago, there was a company called Approach Software, and they produced a database product called Approach, which ended up being bought by Lotus. It was formed by a small group of individuals, most of whom had an IT industry background. They had an idea for a new approach to database products, so they put up a LOT of money, and in some cases left comfortable senior management positions with MAJOR software houses to go it alone in a start-up. They worked very hard, and took a lot of risks, in order to try to live their dream.

As it happened, they came up with a fairly novel approach (hence the name), and a pretty good product and made a fortune each when Lotus bought them out. But to do that requires people to are prepared to take major risks. It often means risking everything you have and borrowing up to the hilt. If it goes well, you make a mint. If it goes badly, you can end up in bankrupcy court. When people are prepared to put in that kind of effort, probably over a course of years, to take that kind of risk and to live with the inherent stresses and strains, they do it for profit, not to provide a social service in offering top-end software at rock-bottom prices.

Approach software was, to me, a particularly interesting example because their UK MD, a guy called Jamie Rappaport, arranged for me to go to San Francisco (Redwood City, to be exact) for a meeting with the President and marketing director, so I got to know several of their management team quite well, and got a good look at what they'd been thrpough to set the company up. They may all have done quite well, but they deserved their success.

[excalibur2]

***But that's exactly the point I was making, right from the first post where I quoted you. It wasn't that you pirated it that I picked up on, but the reasons you gave, which was largely that it was a "rip-off" price. If you weren't prepared to pay even £50, then just how cheap did you think WP 3.1 ought to have been for it not to be a "rip-off"***

Well I would answer this first as it is easy.........dos WP5.1 was £250-£350........windows Lotus AmiPro which was superior was £90, and you don't think Wordperfect was a rip off.
WP soon lowered their prices when decent competition arrived and rushed a windows version out which was a disaster.......and of course didn't have the cheek to charge £250-£350 for it.

Edit: Just realised I've being confusing WP with MS windows ver and my posts should be WP5.1.....not WP3.1..................also further confusion as Amipro was ver 3.1

[excalibur2]

***I'm not sure I understand your first point. I can't see how that comment about theft relates to the remark of mine that you quoted. Could you explain it for me, please?***

Your second part about companies and buyers of software, I've answered? Sometimes it's a situation of the haves and have nots........them and us.
And to repeat:- If companies are willing to pay high prices for very good software (remember they get the Vat back plus get tax relief for expenditure) that ordinary people would like but cannot afford what do think happens?............Well you have said WHY people pirate and I have added further reasons.

I don't know the answer to things like piracy in the UK as in a pre war society people seemed to accept that they were poor better, now everyone wants "material" equality........ could be the result of the UK being a "nanny state" who knows as I've read piracy is a lot less in the USA.

[Saracen]

Your second part about companies and buyers of software, I've answered? Sometimes it's a situation of the haves and have nots........them and us.
And to repeat:- If companies are willing to pay high prices for very good software (remember they get the Vat back plus get tax relief for expenditure) that ordinary people would like but cannot afford what do think happens?............Well you have said WHY people pirate and I have added further reasons.

I still don't understand what this, or what I said and you quoted, has to do with theft?

[Saracen]

...

I don't know the answer to things like piracy in the UK as in a pre war society people seemed to accept that they were poor better, now everyone wants "material" equality........ could be the result of the UK being a "nanny state" who knows as I've read piracy is a lot less in the USA.

I'm not sure the nanny state has anything to do with it, but there's certainly a culture of entitlement, as was said earlier, where many people seem to think they're entitled to whatever they want just because they want it, and they want it right now, just because others may have it. It's perrhaps more a case of taking to welfare state to ridiculous and unintended extremes.

[Saracen]

Well I would answer this first as it is easy.........dos WP5.1 was £250-£350........windows Lotus AmiPro which was superior was £90, and you don't think Wordperfect was a rip off.
WP soon lowered their prices when decent competition arrived and rushed a windows version out which was a disaster.......and of course didn't have the cheek to charge £250-£350 for it.

Erm .... no. WP lowered their prices because MS was making serious inroads in the corporate market and taking their customer base away from them, and because Windows was slowly becoming the clear way things were going. WP couldn't have given two hoots what consumer-level packages were doing, precisely because, as I said, it was medium to large corporates that was their target market.

I don't know how familiar you are with the nature of corporate purchasing decisions, but in many cases, the price of the product is FAR from being the prime purchasing criteria. Of much more relevance will be what's generically known as TCO - Total Cost of Ownership.

Suppose a major corporate is thinking of a software change, from WP5.1 (or whatever version) to AmiPro. The first thing they'll look at is how many installs they have to do. 1000? 5000?

Next is the fact that to do that, the IT department will be running around like blue-arsed flies for several months doing it, and that costs a lot of money. Next, you'll have quite a long period where some of the company are using Product A and the rest Product B. Do they inter-operate? Are file formats compatible (and I mean really compatible? If you switch to B, will it open files written in Product A 3 years ago?

For that matter, if you upgrade to Product A v6.0, will it properly work with stuff written in Product A 5.x? I remember a LARGE corporation I know doing system proposals to the US military for major projects, and I mean things like Star Wars projects for ground-to-sat anti-jam frequency-agile encrypting modems, and using a certain well-known graphics design package to do data flow diagrams. On upgrading to the latest version, the new software decided at random to invert some of the directions of data flow indicators, necessitating in a 600-page document having to be proof-read line-by-line.

And, of course, if a corporate switches from one product to another, they have hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of staff, many or all of whom will need training in the new package, so you have a vast cost implied in developing training materials, and in lost productivity while people retrain.

In many cases, the price of the package becomes a minor factor, or even virtually irrelevant. If, and generally ONLY if there's a very clear case of benefits of the new package outweighing the TCO will a major corporate junk an embedded piece of software for an alternative.

And that is the market that WordPerfect was aimed at, not Joe Public. That's why corporate pricing is often as it is. The effort that goes into convincing a major corporate even to upgrade from an existing package to a new version can be extensive. For instance, there's one high-street store I do some work for that still has it's tills, and many of it's back office systems based on proprietary hardware that was in place before PCs became generic. Some branches use PC-based proprietary systems, but others aren't even that advanced. It's all gradually being replaced now, but some of that kit is 20 years old or more. And it's STILL in use today, as we speak.

There's a substantial degree of inertia in the corporate world, due to the substantial cost and inconvenience of switching, and the activities in the consumer world, certainly in the days your talking about, weren't of any real interest to software houses focussing on corporates, because the size of the consumer market was still relatively small, and because the marketing and distribution model was very different. A team spending 18 months developing a customer relationship in the hope of securing a multi-million pound contract from under your competitor's noses is a very different game from developing a package, sticking it in a pretty box, stuffing it on the shelf in a high street store and hoping Joe Public buys it.

You can't judge corporate software pricing by Joe Public's budget levels, and WP wasn't a consumer product. No, it wasn't a rip-off. But when a corporate software house is getting creamed by the competition and losing out in a game it's barely in (Windows products), they'll get desperate. WP got creamed because they didn't take Windows seriously, and by the time they did, the damage was done. If it's difficult to get those corporates to switch products because of the reasons given above, once they have switched, it's virtually impossible to convince them to unswitch. WP didn't see the writing on the wall. It's as simple as that. And they were far from the only ones to make that mistake in the software world - who remembers Lotus 1-2-3, or VisiCalc or Multiplan? Lotus may be familiar to many here, but I'd bet my boots it's a small percentage of Hexus users that ever used Multiplan or VisiCalc.

[excalibur2]

**Your second part about companies and buyers of software, I've answered? Sometimes it's a situation of the haves and have nots........them and us.
And to repeat:- If companies are willing to pay high prices for very good software (remember they get the Vat back plus get tax relief for expenditure) that ordinary people would like but cannot afford what do think happens?............Well you have said WHY people pirate and I have added further reasons.

I still don't understand what this, or what I said and you quoted, has to do with theft?***

Come on my written English can't be so bad that you don't understand what I'm saying......there is a thriving black market out there for ordinary people to have what the rich have and it is copyright theft. Now why does a black market exist at all? Well we have both given the reasons/answers.

So how does this relate to software? Well think about it.

[excalibur2]

***WP lowered their prices because MS was making serious inroads in the corporate market and taking their customer base away from them, and because Windows was slowly becoming the clear way things were going. WP couldn't have given two hoots what consumer-level packages were doing, precisely because, as I said, it was medium to large corporates that was their target market.***

So Lotus can produce a word processor Amipro 3.1 for £99 (checked the price), yet wordperfect with most of the code written over the years, sell their latest dos ver "5.1" for £250-£350........IIRC you could buy the Lotus suite for less than £350 which included "123".
And you still say WP5.1 wasn't a ripoff.....erm

As a matter of interest and IIRC, Corel after taking over Wordperfect produced "letter write" for about £30 for ordinary people. I have no sympathy for WP, as an ordinary person, and they deserve to be a has-been.


Your second part about how corporations work etc is all very interesting but is not relevent to ordinary people who just want the excellent software that the rich or businesses have............cheap.
This might not be financially possible, so quite a few people just steal (pirate) it, but at least companies like Adobe realise the problem and bring out cut down versions to try to prevent piracy.

A question for all those that are whiter than white:- say you wanted to test a scanner or similar that only runs on windows 98, would you go out and buy win98 for about £60 for OEM ver or borrow a copy off someone for a quick test.

[dangel]

Don't mention Lotus - it's so bad not even pirates will touch it..

BTW whassup with not using the quote system? Makes your posts hard to read!

[Saracen]

Come on my written English can't be so bad that you don't understand what I'm saying......there is a thriving black market out there for ordinary people to have what the rich have and it is copyright theft. Now why does a black market exist at all? Well we have both given the reasons/answers.

So how does this relate to software? Well think about it.

Okay. Theft is a very specific thing, and for something to be theft, a number of points need to be established. Copyright "theft" is a generic and inaccurate term, since it doesn't mean the same thing as theft, and there's no such thing as copyright theft, in law. Copyright infringement, yes, but not theft. There are similarities, and parallels, but the fact that it's about IP not physical property makes it hard to see how theft can be applied, since that requires an "intent to permanently deprive" the rightful owner.

Now that you refer to it as copyright theft, I can see what you mean.

But it has no relation to tha point I made that you quoted, when you went started talking about theft.

My point was that WP are aiming at one market. You said WP should bring out a cheap version for the masses. I said

So why the hell should WP Corp bring out a low-end version? That's not the market they serve, just as it isn't Ferrari's or Aston Martin's. You seem to think they have some kind of a duty to provide product for "Joe Public", just because Jow Public might aspire to their product. Well, they don't.

And to suggest they they should, and that the fact that they don't is justification for piracy or "encouraging piracy" is exactly the kind of self-serving rationalisation that I've been objecting to, for the reason Directhex so eloquently stated.

You quoted that, and said

Why there is no argument against theft, there is an argument more centred around the psychology and philosophy of joe public over the last say 40 years..........joe public just want what others have, it's as simple as that.....crimes from piracy to financial swindles must run into millions of incidents/year

The only way I can interpret your comment about theft in relation to the post you quoted is that WP Corp are somehow committing theft in relation to refusing to bring out a low-end version. And I can't see how that makes any sense at all. And that is why I couldn't understand what you were on abpout - it was the context in which you made the remark about theft.

[Saracen]

...
So Lotus can produce a word processor Amipro 3.1 for £99 (checked the price), yet wordperfect with most of the code written over the years, sell their latest dos ver "5.1" for £250-£350........IIRC you could buy the Lotus suite for less than £350 which included "123".
And you still say WP5.1 wasn't a ripoff.....erm

Yes, because, as I've said time and again, different products for different markets. Rip-off does NOT mean expensive, it means dishonest, fraudulent, etc. WP was priced at corporate levels for the reasons I've given above, at length. It was not priced at budget-conscious home users because that wasn't who it was aimed at. The PRICE of software, both back then and now, is often a fairly small part of the TCO and that is the basis on which corporates make purchase decisions - the benefits to be obtained versus the TOTAL cost of switching or upgrading, including disruption, training, etc. Price is usually very important to home users, but far less so to business users because much of the real cost comes in time. Price can, to corporates, even be near to irrelevant at that level, because there are many other factors iinvolved. And to WP, you have no idea how retail price relates to profit margin, marketing costs, development costs, overall costs or to what percentage of any net ,argin was distributed as profits, or what risks investors took to achieve that, or to how much of that margin went back into funding future development costs. The fact that you, or most home users, couldn't or wouldn't afford WP does NOT make it a rip-off, because it wasn't aimed at that market! The market it was aimed at, corporates, bought it in droves, because whatever the price, they perceived it as good value for the benefit they derived. If they hadn't perceived it so, they wouldn't have bought it sufficiently to make it at least one of the market leaders. So no, it clearly wasn't a rip-off. Companies evaluated what they were getting, and bought anyway - in lasrge numbers.

[Splash]

A question for all those that are whiter than white:- say you wanted to test a scanner or similar that only runs on windows 98, would you go out and buy win98 for about £60 for OEM ver or borrow a copy off someone for a quick test.

I'll answer your question with a question - why would anyone want to test a scanner or similar that runs on Windows 98 if they didn't have a copy?


And for the love of God - will you please use the [quote] tags? Won't somebody please think of the children?