PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

You cannot compare hardware or boxed software price cuts to downloadable software price cuts. Each 'unit' of a hardware product has had money thrown at it.. it even costs money to store it! The same goes for boxed software, although the cost of producing the retail unit is obviously not in the league of hardware stuff. When you see price cuts on stuff like this, it is in order to 'cut losses', firstly in terms of storage (which does cost a lot!), but also because of the fear of ending up with large stocks of an obsolete product which has since been superceded by newer better ones.

Downloadable software costs next to nothing to make and distribute (cost of electricity and internet connection I suppose). Therefore there is no real reason to discount it, other than certain promotional pushes.

peace

Well, it doesn't cost NOTHING to make, or perhaps develop would be a better word. True there's no packaging or materials cost, but it is certainly not free to develop things. The code is just more cost flexible in that each module is stored in several stages of code (which if you search your devices folders, does not take up much space), and can be infinitely reproduced, so it is much more able to take price cuts as you can always 'print' more of them and make back the money in volume sales. A piece of tangible hardware is a bit harder to conform to the same parameters. Pretty much what you said, but I'm wasting time at work and I though it needed clarifying.

Sam

I thought I made it clear with the distinction between boxed and downloadable software, that I was talking about making the actual 'units' to be sold, I guess it wasnt clear... development costs obviously do exist and are by no means negligible at all.. I should know, I work at a software company

peace