About 10 years ago (?) I bought my first PC from Dell. It was a P1 266MHz. It cost me £1700 or $3400. At the time it was probably mid range, so in todays terms it might set me back say £600 or $1200. That is significantly less than 50% of the price in absolute terms. I have not followed software prices, but has their been any equivalent drop in operating system or office software prices during the same time period?
Absolutely. Back in the day, a good spreadsheet like Lotus 1-2-3 couuld cost $400 by itself. I believe the first versions of MS Word were in the same ballpark. Good accounting packages ran in the thousands. Ventura Publisher was $2000.
Today, you can get an office software suite that contains a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation application, and tons of utilities for around a hundred bucks, if it doesn’t already come bundled with the computer.
You can download MySQL for free, and get a better database than the first SQL databases that cost thousands of bucks. You can download free programming languages that are far better than anything available ten years ago, and free programming environments like Eclipse that are better than many commercial environments today.
Then there’s all the functionality available on the internet, which is dirt cheap and wasn’t available at any price ten years ago (the internet existed, but only as a tiny seed of its current self).
Or you can get something like Open Office for about $0 that’s compatible (though probably not 100%) with MS Office.
I am learning! What about operating systems? How does Windows today compare with 3.1 or equivalent?
Windows was never that expensive, but compare Linux to Unix! Back in the day, a Unix OS could cost you $5,000. Easily. Today you can download Linux for free.
Gah! I feel the need to go into Monty Python mode. In my day we considerered ourselves lucky if we could use our own testicles as hard drive lubricant. We thought ourselves fortunate if we were allowed to eat old mercury based monitors. And if we were given cold gravel, well luxury it was… luxury.
Thanks for you replies!
I agree, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison. What kind of support did that $5000 Unix package come with, and how much does it cost today to get an equivalent level of support?
I agree with other posters that software prices have come down, but the reasons for hardware price drops and software price drops are a little different, IMHO. The hardware price drops are due to a combination of the mass market, creating economies of scale, and to amazing speed of technology improvements (CPU speed doubling every year, etc.).
With software, there are certainly technology improvements, but not nearly at the same breakneck pace as with hardware. The creation of the mass market for software, creating enormous economies of scale, is responsible for the drop in price. Remember, the marginal cost of software is very small, just for copying and distribution, so all the cost is in development and marketing. Also, the demand curve for software is a lot different with the creation of the mass market. Early users were business users figuring out the cost/benefit of buying software; spending thousands of software could easily save even more thousands. But the average guy isn’t going to spend a couple grand on TurboTax, so the supply side responds.
Don’t underestimate the value of powerful tools that are available, as well as the huge industry in 3-rd party plug-ins, add-ons, components, etc.
We can build a software product today with 1/100 the manpower an equivalent program would have cost ten years ago, because we have access to DirectX, SQL engines, communications libraries, ad infinitem. If we need to write a new program that reads data from a logic controller and writes it to an SQL database, it’s often just the matter of buying a commercial device driver for the device, an SQL back-end library, and then just gluing them together.
Software construction today is orders of magnitude more efficient than it used to be. I’ve been writing software since 1978, so I know what I’m talking about. Part of it has been the rise of object-oriented languages, but a big part is that the OS does so much for us nowadays. Writing a multi-threaded application that reads and writes from five different databases is just a matter of gluing together the right OS components using technologies like ADO. Twenty years ago, you had to write all the connectivity stuff from scratch, write the databases from scratcch, often in assembler for performance, etc. Stuff that takes a day now took months ten years ago.
In some cases, software prices haven’t come down anywhere near the level hardware has.
One of the things that keeps government types interested in Microsoft is the cost of the Windows license in relation to the cost of the hardware. The OS cost has become a larger percentage of the overall cost of a PC.
While there are now free alternatives to Windows and Office, comparing them isn’t exactly apples to apples.
Microsoft would say the state of the software prices is due to all the new features and improvements they’ve made. Others would respond Microsoft is forcing them to buy new features they don’t want and to pay for bug fixes that should have been unneeded, or at least provided for free.