>Computers are extremely cheap. Before personal computers I'd >have to buy very expensive manufacturing machine to provide >such value with so little work.
That's because you not living in a third world country. In a third world country one brand new dell laptop ( not very high end one) can easily cost as much as the salary of a programmer.
In my country (that fortunately is not third world but also not the first world exactly) I can buy decent (not high end) computer for my monthly developer earnings and I consider this to be really cheap. There is no other machine so cheap that could provide me with way to produce so much value.
Cheep programmers = buy cheep PC's. You can get a lot of HW for 300$.
Edit: Ok, I understand the downvotes, but I spent a lot of time developing on HW far worse than what 300$ can buy you today.
From dell:
Starting Price $269
Windows
AMD Sempron™ LE-1300 (2.3GHz, 800MHz, 512KB)
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz
320GB4 Serial ATA Hard Drive Maybe you are being downvoted for spelling cheap as cheep or maybe some programmers feel offended by your "cheap programmers" that sounds degrading. "Less affluent programmers can buy cheaper PC's" sounds better.
But changes do have cost. Developer time has to be paid one or another way eventually and degradation of quality raises maintenance and bug fixing costs. All this has to be (and is) factored in the price of the software.
On the other hand I think the first point is completely bogus. Computers are extremely cheap. Before personal computers I'd have to buy very expensive manufacturing machine to provide such value with so little work. If I had no money to start with I'd be forced to work for somebody who had capital to purchase the machine. I might never be able to afford one myself.
Actually software is extremely cheap because computers are cheap. Software that costs zero could not be possible if computers were expensive.