[bwest87]

One thing that has become clearer to me over the years is that reasoning by analogy (like this article does) sounds a lot smarter than it is. If you look from first principles, it's clear that physical goods and software don't share the same properties and thus the analogy falls apart.

Physical goods like clothes or cars have variable costs. The marginal unit always costs > 0, and thus the price to the consumer is always greater than zero. Industrialization lowered this variable cost, while simultaneously increasing production capacity, and thus enabled a new segment of "low cost, high volume" products, but it does not eliminate the variable cost. This variable cost (eg. the cost of a hand made suit) is the "umbrella" under which a low cost variant (factory made clothes) has space to enter the market.

Digital goods have zero marginal cost. Many digital goods do not cost anything at all to the consumer! Or they are as cheap as possible to actively maximize users because their costs are effectively fixed. What is the "low value / low cost" version of Google? or Netflix for that matter? This is non-sensical because there's no space for a low cost entrant to play in when the price is already free.

In digital goods, consumers tend to choose on quality because price is just not that relevant of a dimension. You see this in the market structure of digital goods. They tend to be winner (or few) take all because the best good can serve everyone. That is a direct result of zero marginal cost.

Even if you accept the premise that AI will make software "industrialized" and thus cheaper to produce, it doesn't change the fact that most software is already free or dirt cheap.

The version of this that might make sense is software that is too expensive to make at all because the market size (eg. number of consumers * price they would pay) is less than the cost of the software developer / entrpreneurs time. But by definition those are small markets, and not anything like the huge markets that were enabled by physical good industrialization.

[gamblor956]

Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources).

Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dying breed. In the physical world, it's why shein and alibaba nearly became trillion-dollar companies.

[bwest87]

Sure there is some minimal marginal cost, but it's so close to zero that it's usually negligible, and the incentive is to basically give it away and "monetize" something else. Your point about games actually just makes my original point. Software is already usually free or dirt cheap, which is why reducing the cost to make the software can't create some "low cost / low value" quadrant. Unless your talking about bespoke software that has such a small market size it isn't worth making today. I could maybe see that area opening up, but even that software would not fit the OP's description of software that "has no owner and is not meant to be maintained"

[array_key_first]

I feel like we can round down fractions of a cent to zero. In practice, it's basically zero.

And, I think, consumers would like to balance both cost and quality. The problem is cost is obvious, quality is purposefully obfuscated. You really can't tell what is or is not quality software without spending an unreasonable amount of time and requiring an unreasonable amount of knowledge. Same with most modern physical goods.

[IshKebab]

> storage space...

You don't need to explain this. Literally everyone here knows what you said, and everyone - including you - knew that he also knew that.

This is pointless and annoying nitpicking.

[skybrian]

Analogies are useful for adding new possibilities to the list of ideas you consider. They're not good for ruling anything out; you need other forms of reasoning for that.

[Ghos3t]

In the article he does mention that it's not a 1 to 1 comparison