🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov17.203540.5725@alphalpha.com> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
>Yes it's true that I can sit in a hole with a $6000 machine (and a
>$600 modem) and code with no additional costs.  If I don't have to
>worry about salary and insurance and clothing for my kids, and all
>I ever plan to do is give away the software to people who hear about
>it on the net.  But you know what?  If those are your assumptions, I
>bet I could sell paperclips with an initial outlay of $6K too.  What
>costs money is building up a production that is capable of making
>money.  And that's true of paperclips *and* software.

I believe Microsoft began its life as a couple of guys writing a BASIC
interpreter in their garage.  Computer spreadsheets were invented by
Frankston and Bricklan on an Apple II in one of their apartments; they
later formed Software Arts to market Visicalc, and were eventually bought
out by Lotus (which I'll bet also began life as a personal endeavor).  I
imagine that many other popular microcomputer applications were invented
and initially marketed on such shoestring budgets.

Yes, over time, as your operation gets bigger, overhead increases.  But
manufacturing has a built-in capital overhead just to get started.
Manufacturing company founders generally have to take out huge loans or get
venture capital investment; software companies don't usually have to.  They
start out small, and can use their income to fund growth, instead of
starting big and paying off the loans with much of the income.  You don't
need a large support group until you have a large customer base, so it's
silly to hire support people early on (what would happen if the product
didn't sell well -- you'd be stuck with a support group being paid to do
nothing, and very little revenues).  Marketing can also be done
inexpensively; a one-person operation doesn't need to take out full-page
ads in every publication.


-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar