esr

Eric Raymond gave a talk at work yesterday. He was an excellent speaker - informative, entertaining, and unassuming.

One of his points was that the factory model of software is a delusion (sorry, Metrowerks). Eric's argument drew on the concepts of use value and sale value. The use value of software is its value as a tool which allows you to accomplish some task. The sale value is the value of software as something which can be sold to others (e.g. at a retail store). Most people assume that sale value is proportional to use value. According to Eric, this is not true.

Consider the following: RandomProduct sells at CompUSA for $200 on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the producer of RandomProduct discontinues the product. On Thursday, RandomProduct is in the discount bin at CompUSA for $10, even though the product still has the same usefulness as it did two days ago. Eric claimed that this is because the price a consumer is willing to pay for software is determined by the "expected future value of vendor service". Thus, the software industry is a service industry. Eric went on to explain how software publishers screw consumers when they operate under the false presumption that they are in a manufacturing industry. For example, you want to have your best people doing the things that make you money. In a manufacturing model, this means having your best people pump out code like there's no tomorrow, while those who can't cut it get sent of to man the support desk. Hence, the crappy support prevalent in the software industry.

Although I'm inclined to agree with Eric's argument, I still have some doubts. It seems as if the same argument could be applied to just about any product, thereby making every industry a service industry. Still, he only had an hour or so to speak, and this was just one of many topics covered, so I'll give him a chance. I just ordered a printed copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar from buy.com (yes, it's all available on his website, but I hate reading from a monitor).