"Is Adobe obligated to make the price of Photoshop commensurate to the cost of burning a DVD or downloading a file?"

Of course people who have never run a business and don't understand the total cost of running a business will always relate "cost" to one thing what you pay for a particular item which when factoring a host of other things is either not relevant or not easily determined.

I just read where Tesla (an HN favorite) gets tax credits of something like $35k (tradeable to other mfgs) for each car they sell. Forgetting whether that number is right or not (maybe it's less/more who knows) does that mean that they should somehow in ratio reduce the price of their car? Of course not (unless they want to). Even though one could make an argument that it isn't fair that they don't. To me all this is nonsense. But fully understandable if someone has never operated a working business.

> I just read where Tesla (an HN favorite) gets tax credits of something like $35k (tradeable to other mfgs) for each car they sell. Forgetting whether that number is right or not (maybe it's less/more who knows) does that mean that they should somehow in ratio reduce the price of their car? Of course not (unless they want to). Even though one could make an argument that it isn't fair that they don't. To me all this is nonsense. But fully understandable if someone has never operated a working business.

To be fair, how you run your business depends greatly on this. Other companies would distribute the profit from this tax credit to shareholders or executives; Tesla is using it to continue with R&D and to fund expansion.

> Of course people who have never run a business and don't understand the total cost of running a business...

Can you please stop with the flamebait? It's not conducive to productive discussion.

To address your point, not everything should (ethical judgment) be priced based on value. Do you not see the difference between a Tesla and internet service? What about electricity - should PG&E charge based on how much value they provide? Have you ever tried living without power? Because it's certainly worth more than the $50 a month I currently pay. What about medical treatment? What if the ER charged 10% of your lifetime future income for lifesaving treatment? That seems commensurate with the value provided, doesn't it?

"Can you please stop with the flamebait?"

Point taken. I guess things like this piss me off so I flew off the handle in that way. So I apologize.

"Do you not see the difference between a Tesla and internet service?"

Ok well with respect to that we are not talking about Internet service but a faster type of Internet service that is by no means essential in any way (such as your other examples electricity and medical treatment). You don't need 100meg service and for that matter you really don't even need to stream video. Essential internet (wouldn't you agree) is really basic things and the bandwidth to support email, going to the government website, shopping for a car, etc. I don't consider enough bandwidth so several members of one family can all stream Netflix at one time essential. And that is what I had in my mind as I was making my comment.

In that respect the faster internet service might be more like elective surgery (say plastic surgery but not reconstructive surgery) which is not the same as medical treatment in an ER.

Of course not, your attempt to analogise the situation with Adobe is ridiculous. A better analogy would be if Adobe had a file-size restricted version and charged $300 to "upgrade" to the unrestricted version - the upgrade of course would be a simple patch to remove the restriction, that anyone could run locally by downloading the patch. Instead however they'd insist it was a hardware change and send someone to futz around on your computer.

Now of course you can charge what you like and price differentiation doesn't have to relate to actual costs at all, but lying to deceive the customer that the charge is paying for some direct action of employees necessary to enact the alteration is simply fraud.

Now there are of course costs, upstream bandwidth, data handling at intermediate routers and such. That's why it's entirely reasonable for them to charge more for a faster/broader data plan - http://www.comcast.com/internet-service.html it's already charged at more than twice the rate of the 50 Mbps plan (whilst I imagine the real _additional_ cost is probably maybe a few dollars); but that's fine as they're not pretending it costs more because they have to pay for faster electricity or something daft.

I don't see why my analogy is any more ridiculous than yours. Windows 7 Home is more-or-less an artificially limited version of Windows 7 Pro. You can pay money and "unlock" the Pro features. I'm OK with that. Even though I'm unlocking bits that were already on my hard drive, there's no scandal here.

If we both agree you can charge whatever you want and price differences don't have to relate to actual costs then what's the problem?

You are upset solely that they called it an "installation fee" rather than an "upgrade fee"? I see your point... but like I said, hardly the crime of the century.

Right, because PhotoShop implements, tests, documents, and maintains itself via... magic.

Yes, that was my point. Comcast's backend infrastructure similarly does not run on magic.