Steven D'Aprano said:
Thanks for going beyond the call of duty to research the facts in such
You're welcome! Like most amateur investors, I kid myself that research
makes my stock picks better (considering the tiny amounts one actually
invests, I doubt that any dollar difference divided by the time needed
to do research actually reaches to minimum hourly wage, so, it's more in
the nature of an excuse, I guess;-).
detail. I'm surprised that Adobe is selling so many licences -- I don't
know anyone who has paid for Adobe software in many years -- and you can
take that any way you like. (Kids! Pirating software is stealing!!!)
For reasons that escape me, I appear to observe a much lower inclination
to piracy in the Mac world -- which may help explain why Adobe makes
over 1/4 of their sales there, according to one of their tables, even
though they get strong competition from Apple itself. E.g: surely
professional Acrobat must sell less when the OS itself ensures any app
can "print" to PDF, as MacOS X does; in the video field, of which I know
nothing first-hand, I'm told Apple's Final Cut, express and pro, vastly
outsells Adobe's comparable offerings; etc. I guess these effects, and
the fact that Macs are less than 10% of laptops and desktops, are
overcompensated by a combination of Mac users' higher propensity to
purchase rather than pirate, and the higher prevalence of "creative
professionals" in the Mac crowd.
"any source of income from services or goods". There is also a more
restrictive (there's that word again...) sense of a sale being a transfer
of ownership. In that stricter sense, nobody sells software -- they
merely licence it.
This "legalistic" take has generally little to do with the *accounting*
interpretation of "selling" -- and since you were asking specifically
about *profits*, accounting is really the only way to answer.
But, if "transfer of ownership" is what you mean, you're STILL totally
wrong in doubting that there is a lot of profit being made today by
selling software -- transfering ownership of software. What do you
think the IT giants of India MOSTLY make profits on? While they're
relentlessly trying to branch out to other sources, such as consulting
and all kinds of services, and starting to show interesting results in
these expansion efforts, still today MOST of their profits come from
writing software for some customer firm and transferring ownership of
the software in question -- i.e., SELLING software by this strict legal
definition.
In terms of accounting (GAAP) this might in fact be better framed as a
service -- "writing software on your behalf" rather than "transferring
to you the ownership of this software written to your specifications";
and the operating margins, now that the market for top professionals in
Bangalore &c has heated up so much, are aligned with "resellers of
services", lower than those of "sellers of software" in the normal
accounting interpretation.
But you can't have it both ways -- if you mean "selling" in the normal
accounting sense, you're wrong as I showed in the last post; if you mean
in the legalistic sense, you're wrong as I'm showing here. For each
dollar of profit anybody makes, you can no doubt deny it comes from
selling software in SOME sense of "selling", since the legalistic
meaning conflicts with the accounting one -- but fix any ONE meaning,
and you're still wrong. Including the strangely mixed one here...:
The sense of "software sales" I mean is intermediate between the two. The
way I mean "sales", when Joe Public goes to acmesoft.com, pays $99 on his
credit card number to download Acmesoft FooMaker, that's a sale. When he
OK, then among companies which make profits selling software are
BestBuy, CompUSA and so on -- you're welcome to drill down into their
detailed financial reports yourself, but just consider the amounts of
precious shelf space that they devote to shrink-wrapped boxes of games,
anti-virus thingies, and the like... do you think those retailers don't
have any sense of which side their bread is buttered on?-) As a very
rough 0th-order approximation, you can take it that those chains'
*profits* come in very roughly equal parts from sales of hardware,
software, and services (mostly extended warranties on the HW they sell,
but also out of warranties repairs, etc etc) -- the sales volumes are
WAY higher for HW, lower for SW and lowest for services, but the margins
go the other way 'round, by far.
This sense of "selling software" of course has nothing to do with
licenses: some of the software these retailers "sell" is covered by
various commercial licenses, some by GPL or other open source licenses,
and some is even in the public domain. So you could say they're in fact
selling pretty colored boxes with shrink-wrap, containing a booklet and
a CD (and the ownership of these physical components is indeed
transferred, so the legalistic meaning of "sale" is fully satisfied
too;-). Sometimes there's a license agreement being executed (if
"shrink-wrap licenses" have any legal standing -- I'm not sure that
jurisprudence in the matter is settled yet), sometimes not, but that
makes no real difference to either the retailer's business model or the
purchaser's perceptions. Purchasers today are reasonably aware that
they might probably download the same programs, in many cases, either
for free or at a substantial discount, but they're buying the
convenience of loading them from CD (and in the case of, e.g., anti
virus defences and personal firewalls, may feel they need that because
connecting to the net for the download without such protection may be
deadly -- whether the feeling is 100% accurate or not, is neither here
nor there). Or maybe they like the colorful box and booklet. But while
discussing while a sale is or isn't made through this or that channel is
important, it doesn't affect the fact that a sale IS made and brings
operating income (thus profits, if the margins are good).
Lastly, I don't think your distinction makes much sense. You say it
counts as a sale for you if JP pays $99 for the download. But what is
the difference if the download is free but the program just downloaded
is a hobbled "demo" version? If you want to really USE it, you buy a
license which comes with a code to unlock full functionality -- and it
so happens the license costs $99. Why do you think it is a crucial
distinction as to whether the $99 are forked over to enable the download
itself, or just AFTER the download to make the just-downloaded bits
useful? Looks like an irrelevant detail to me if I ever saw one...
Alex
