Exaggerated losses?
Ars Technica has a brief article about an interesting rebuttal to the CRIA claims about how P2P piracy is costing them dearly.
I’m against piracy in all it’s forms, whether it’s guys with eye patches on the open seas or people at computers trading files. I say this not only because I work in partnership (of sorts) with the music industry but also because I make my living as a software developer. And stealing music can cost jobs in much the same way as stealing software can cost developer jobs.
An interesting parallel worth looking at is the software industry in the late eighties and early nineties. Games and software cost about the same price back then, for the sake of math we’ll say around the $50 mark. That was about a day’s pay for a reserve soldier with the rank of Trooper in Canada back then (I made $44 / day when I joined). Today, a Trooper makes $76 per day and the cost of the average game has, for the most part, gone down (Amazon’s top sellers average $46 and their new releases average $36). I think a big part of that trend stems from the shareware movement, where software was written by guys like me and people were given it for free and encouraged to share it with all their friends. The deal was that if you liked it, you were supposed to send in a donation or a set amount to pay for the use of the software.
The reason that this shareware thing worked was because the software industry is a very fluid industry. There are some big players, like Microsoft, but they don’t control all the software. And now with the open-source movement, it is doubtful that any one entity will ever control all things software. The end result was good for everyone; commercial software makers realized that in order to compete, the code they wrote would have to be fast, feature-rich, stable, and reasonably priced. It’s not the case one hundred percent of the time, but I think it’s pretty close. Do I think software piracy is less common today than it was twenty years ago? I don’t know for sure, but I think so.
So the moral of the story I think is that in order to keep ahead in business, a company needs to be fluid enough to change direction ahead (or directly behind) the trend, otherwise they risk alienating themselves.
Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:38 Posted in General
