Economics for Beginners

[andrewducker]

(Or: How we don't really know anything)

Go here, read, be amused.

Comments

[miramon.livejournal.com]

That was very interesting. I think he's completely wrong about site licences though. He has a very shrinkwrapped software view of the world.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

He only considers the unlimited use site licence. In my experience site licences tend to have a sliding scale of price brackets depending on the number of users: 50-100, 100-200, etc.

Thanks!

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

yes, I agree that he is over simplifying things to make a point, but at the same time that he's waving his hands and saying it can't be understood, he's still deriving answers from dodgy assumptions.

As miramon and a_pawson have said, site licenses are very variable. There may be 3,000 employees at company A and they may pay a site licence that's only the equivalent of 500 retail copies, but then maybe only 200 users at Company A would actually use the product or would have been willing to share a copy, so that's actually 300 *extra* sales rather than 2,500 less.

And I've worked in several companies where we'd buy a site licence for, say, Word Perfect Office, and then a year later we switched over to Microsoft Outlook+Office, and we just deleted the WordPerfect stuff. If we had individual retail licences we'd have probably tried to sell them on, thereby diluting the retail market for WordPerfect.

Re: Thanks!

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I'd run my business like a sports team - fire everyone (waive them), buy the site license for cheap, and then rehire them all. >_>