In rec.aviation.student Nomen Nescio wrote:
From: Le Chaud Lapin

In any case, because the material cost of software is $0, the cost of
verification would have to be very high indeed before a point would
reached, beyond which, it did not make sense to make the software
because the market could not support it.

There's a saying in the pharmaceutical industry that seems appropriate, here.

"Sure we can make the pills for a dime each.......but the first one costs
$150 million."

Very nice, and applies well to software too. Of course it's not true that
software has 0 marginal cost. There are support costs, which can be
significant.

But let's say that software really does have zero marginal cost. Well,
this is extremely *bad* news for the use of software in GA, not good news
as has been presented.

Why? Because software costs a *lot* of money to make. And with zero
marginal cost, the price is effectively the development cost divided by
the size of the audience.

GA is a pretty damn small audience. Why do you think you can buy a
perfectly capable car GPS, with a database full of every road in the
country, for under $200 but you'll spend ten times that much on something
that's significantly less capable for your airplane? Certification and
liability come into it, of course, but even ignoring those you would spend
what seems to be an unreasonable amount of money. This is just because the
development costs are fixed but the audience is microscopic.

To keep costs down, you want something with low development costs, even if
the material cost is significant. This mean proven designs, simple
mechanical linkages, etc. And guess what, that's what we have. Software
isn't going to save you any money unless you either find a way to make
multipurpose software that the public can also use, increase the GA pilot
population by an order of magnitude, or create a magical software-making
machine that can cut your development costs by an order of magnitude.

To extend the pharmaceutical analogy a bit, if you want cheap pills then
you'd better contract a really common disease or use a treatment which has
existed for a long time. If you want brand new treatment for a rare
disease then it's going to cost you a whole lot of money.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon