I endorse explaining things. That said, you make it sound like the existence of a thriving market for cheap low-quality goods is much stronger evidence against the existence of a market for expensive high-quality goods than it seems to me to be.
Hrm? I had taken mwengler to be making a different point: the lack of a market for high-quality software outside life-critical applications suggests that such software is not cost-effective to produce.
Bingo on asr. Engineers and economists do the same thing: optimize. It is as expensive a mistake to put $1billion more into something than it is worth as it is to put $1billion less into something than it is worth.
The overwhelming success of markets for software at the quality at which it is at is not indicative of a failure of the market or even of the software. It is indicative that the right tradeoff between fixing bugs, new features, delay, and more development money is where it is, that higher quality software might even exist and simply not make money.
It is tremendously important to realize in economics, engineering, and probably other fields, that perfection is infinitely expensive and is therfore provably NOT the goal.
There’s one important caveat here, which I want to call attention to. There are externalities here. Some of the cost of bad software is paid by people out across the network who receive spam, DDOS attacks etc, that would have been prevented if I had ran a more secure system. So it might be that the economically optimal level of software quality is higher than the current market would imply.
That said, i agree the optimal level is probably far short of perfection. It happens regularly that some program on my machine will crash (without affecting the rest of the system.) I’m not willing to pay very much to reduce the rate of such events.
This still leaves the possibility that people are underestimating the cost to them of fairly unreliable software. Lowering the threshold to effective action can make a big difference.
I endorse explaining things. That said, you make it sound like the existence of a thriving market for cheap low-quality goods is much stronger evidence against the existence of a market for expensive high-quality goods than it seems to me to be.
Hrm? I had taken mwengler to be making a different point: the lack of a market for high-quality software outside life-critical applications suggests that such software is not cost-effective to produce.
Bingo on asr. Engineers and economists do the same thing: optimize. It is as expensive a mistake to put $1billion more into something than it is worth as it is to put $1billion less into something than it is worth.
The overwhelming success of markets for software at the quality at which it is at is not indicative of a failure of the market or even of the software. It is indicative that the right tradeoff between fixing bugs, new features, delay, and more development money is where it is, that higher quality software might even exist and simply not make money.
It is tremendously important to realize in economics, engineering, and probably other fields, that perfection is infinitely expensive and is therfore provably NOT the goal.
There’s one important caveat here, which I want to call attention to. There are externalities here. Some of the cost of bad software is paid by people out across the network who receive spam, DDOS attacks etc, that would have been prevented if I had ran a more secure system. So it might be that the economically optimal level of software quality is higher than the current market would imply.
That said, i agree the optimal level is probably far short of perfection. It happens regularly that some program on my machine will crash (without affecting the rest of the system.) I’m not willing to pay very much to reduce the rate of such events.
This still leaves the possibility that people are underestimating the cost to them of fairly unreliable software. Lowering the threshold to effective action can make a big difference.