Cheap software is becoming a cheap commodity.

It's relatively easy for any competent software developer to write a diary app with a pretty UI skin, or a basic text editor and formatting engine to drive a lightweight word processor, or a simple puzzle game. I could write a relatively good application in any of those categories in a weekend, and no doubt so could thousands of other people on HN today.

And importantly, that's just fine. There are very many people who will get some value from a fun puzzle game or a simple personal organiser, and who will pay a small amount in return, and so there are many software developers who make a decent income writing just that kind of software.

But what about the next level up? When I had to write a serious document for an organisation that normally used an on-line "office suite", I gave up and switched to more traditional software. It turns out that things like footnotes and cross-references and tables of contents and careful page layout matter if you're producing something that many people are going to spend a lot of time using, and at the time Google Docs could do exactly none of those things while Word could do them all easily. At the rate they were paying me, with the time saved by using the more powerful software, the cost of that software was probably recovered in days, if not hours.

The reality of modern web and mobile software is that a lot of it is cheap, and it should be cheap, because it adds only a little value and it isn't very hard to create it. The trouble is that some software does add a lot more value and is hard to create and shoudn't be cheap, but companies like Microsoft have inadequately defended their ground and so even software that could save a customer $1,000 a week gets comments like "$10? No way!" on app stores.

This isn't a "Post PC" era. This is the "Web Era".

Not until Google Docs does footnotes and cross-references and tables of contents and careful page layout, it isn't. Some people just got the wrong memo.

LibreOffice does footnotes and cross-references just fine and LibreOffice is 0 USD. Here's the thing - MS Office is innovative and still the best at what it does. But it's old and like anything old, it becomes a commodity.

Adobe Photoshop is also innovative and still the best at what it does (by far). The problem that Adobe has though is that many Photoshop licensees are not professionals and can be served just as well by cheaper or even free software. Companies like Adobe also benefited a lot from piracy, as a lot of people ended up using Photoshop, even though not that many people can afford it.

Also, what you're seeing here unfolding with web apps is only the begging. In relative terms, the concept of a web app is still young. Even in early 2000, people had no idea that they can have apps running in their browser and broadband / 3G / 4G is still not a reality in many parts of this world. The combination of cheap and easily accessible on any platform, without any lock-in whatsoever, is extremely powerful. Couple this with devices that are designed to be portable and always connected and you've got a killer that will cannibalize everything else.

> The reality of modern web and mobile software is that a lot of it is cheap, and it should be cheap, because it adds only a little value and it isn't very hard to create it

Things like Google Docs / Google Calendar / Google Maps / Twitter / Wikipedia give me a hell of a lot more value than anything a desktop app could. Are you saying that you could build these in a weekend?

Sure, and it's a set of desktop applications that run locally on your own computer.

Did you realise you're supporting my position here?

The combination of cheap and easily accessible on any platform, without any lock-in whatsoever, is extremely powerful. Couple this with devices that are designed to be portable and always connected and you've got a killer that will cannibalize everything else.

We've seen thick client vs. thin client before, and no doubt we'll see it again. Today, however, we're still a long way from the utopia you describe.

Things like Google Docs / Google Calendar / Google Maps / Twitter / Wikipedia give me a hell of a lot more value than anything a desktop app could. Are you saying that you could build these in a weekend?

Well, you're obviously picking contrived examples, because most web applications aren't in that class. And of course no individual could literally build a replacement for those services in a weekend. However, it is interesting to consider some factors that would stop them:

1. Hardware resources and network bandwidth to serve so many users at once

2. Large volume of data behind the UI

3. Many import/export options, in some cases

Notice that of those, only the third has anything to do with how hard it is to write the software itself, and even then it's not core functionality. Providing compatibility with existing data formats is often extremely expensive in terms of developer effort, which is part of the reason that competing with the likes of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite is such a high barrier and why incumbents tend to change their file formats every five minutes.

On the other hand, if you were asking whether I could create a Twitter clone to share with friends at first and grow as friends-of-friends joined in, then sure, about a million people here really could write that in a weekend. The core functionality for most of the other services you mentioned could be implemented by a small team in times ranging from a few days to a few weeks, too.

The most interesting thing about this, IMHO, is that it means the core functionality for software with a completely different approach to solving the same problems might also be implemented fairly quickly, and isn't the factor limiting competition and the advancement of the technology. We're being held back by lots of other factors, but most of them are driven by commercial or marketing considerations, not the technology itself.

Looking at it that way, PC vs. web is just a proxy for buy vs. rent. And, like it or not, the "buy" option is slowly being driven from the market.

I don't accept that premise, and moving to Creative Cloud in Adobe's case is a great example of why not.

As it happens, I use Creative Suite for work myself. My company paid a lot of money to buy it. There are plenty of things Adobe could have done that would have made it more valuable to us, and we would gladly have dropped the same money again to buy an upgrade that did a few of those things. But in several years, they haven't managed to do any of them, and so we haven't bought any of the most recent pre-CC versions.

The fact that Adobe's Creative Suite revenue stream dried up in our case has nothing to do with buy vs. rent, it has to do with not adding anything of value to us in several years of development and therefore not being worth buying again. For exactly the same reason, plus the fact that we would never allow our data to effectively be held hostage, we aren't subscribing to Creative Cloud, so Adobe will probably never get any more money from us for that product line.

PC vs. web is only a proxy for buy vs. rent if the purchase really was a one-off. For almost every piece of commercial software I use, that wouldn't necessarily be the case, and in fact the developers could easily add enough value that I'd pay them more money for an upgrade. The fact that they are pushing for the subscription model instead, even while doing funny maths that assumes I would have upgraded regularly to try and justify the cost, just demonstrates to me that they aren't actually confident that they know how to add that value and keep me paying them.

And, like it or not, the "buy" option is slowly being driven from the market.

I don't really accept that premise, either. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have held near-unassailable leads in large and lucrative software markets for years. Of course they can abuse that position for a while to price gouge those who, rightly or wrongly, feel that they absolutely must have the latest versions of things to be able to work properly. It's even worthwhile for the software companies to offer the first hit for free, but in the end, what they're doing still isn't in the best interests of their customers. Sooner or later the market is going to figure that out, and sooner or later someone with a smarter plan is going to start providing a real alternative.