Why software should sell with minimum 400% margin
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="700"] An artist enjoying his time.[/caption]
Software writing is truly an art. It takes artists, people with passion to write it. Its needs one to understand what must be transformed into what and that must be told to computers. That requires diligent work and love of job. This requires quality people to be hired.
Artists are not mere animals or machines who could be made to work around the clock, constrained by time. They require freedom to think, enjoy life. All this requires money (by products of capitalism, if not life could be enjoyed for free). Hence you need greater profit margins to run your business if you needs true artists in them.
But, look at today's software industry (that too in India). There is a department called human resource, what a derogatory term to call human a resource. This term was last used when the white man thought he was superior and treated others as slaves, its then when people were treated as resource.
I have seen it in practicality. Some people who want to become quick bill gates hire few low quality coders, they pitch for projects with very low profit margins, they make month to month living in such way that if a project is lost for a month, people must be laid off or the company as a whole must be shut down. In those companies I see no happiness.
In some other companies, I see people code with passion, treat the companies as their own. Get a month of holiday for two months of work!!! Have really loyal clients. They have their time for leisure and thought. Now those are the hallmarks of a true software company. Those companies strangely don't have a human resource department which undermines humanity.
But on the whole, software industry I see is going down the hill and is tremendously undervaluing itself and humanity as a whole in the name of beating competition. Clients are not knowing the ill effects of cheap software either and are falling into the trap mostly to see their investment getting vanished.
Coding must be such a fun, but dehumanizing and industrializing it is removing all the fun from it. Possibly that is why free software that's programmed with Love is taking on software created using "human resource".