>You can't stop piracy. It's a supply and demand problem. It's a perception problem.
I would go further; it is a greed/exploitative problem.
You have every type of good in the world manufactured/produced/farmed/coded/filmed/etc. for far less than what the retail cost is. (the initial arguement is supply and demand) -- but that is simply false. Look at profits and margins.
Apple and every oil company in the world is the perfect example of why this is true.
Their supply is NOT in concordance with demand. Their profits and margins show this.
Other business models have proven this out; make things cost less - and more people will buy.
Actually, to Apples credit - this is an area where they are showing this; Apps that cost ~.99 are seen to be a value to the user at that cost thus paid apps make tons. (However, if you look at margins, again Apple fails. Their margin on paid apps is between 100% and ~5% (if you try to figure in the cost of the overall infrastructure to supply the apps (i*Device development etc. though the mobile market has a lot of outlying factors which refudiate the margin cost to apple, whereas the iPad is a device wholly dependent on the app market)
Oil companies have far worse profit margins than say Apple or Microsoft. They have good years and bad years but Exon regularly trades below 10 P/E where tech companies often trade above 20 because tech companies are far more capable of long term growth and far at the whim of classic inelastic supply demand curves. (In other words if oil when back to 30dollars a barrel people would buy more oil, but they would not do so quickly.)
As to iPad's many people buy tablets and never load a single app on them. Unlike consoles where the device is subsidized by the software sold apple treats it's app store as revenue neutral. They have income but they poor it back into iOS development, because long term the OS with the best software wins and they can still make fat margins on the devices themselves.
I would go further; it is a greed/exploitative problem.
You have every type of good in the world manufactured/produced/farmed/coded/filmed/etc. for far less than what the retail cost is. (the initial arguement is supply and demand) -- but that is simply false. Look at profits and margins.
Apple and every oil company in the world is the perfect example of why this is true.
Their supply is NOT in concordance with demand. Their profits and margins show this.
Other business models have proven this out; make things cost less - and more people will buy.
Actually, to Apples credit - this is an area where they are showing this; Apps that cost ~.99 are seen to be a value to the user at that cost thus paid apps make tons. (However, if you look at margins, again Apple fails. Their margin on paid apps is between 100% and ~5% (if you try to figure in the cost of the overall infrastructure to supply the apps (i*Device development etc. though the mobile market has a lot of outlying factors which refudiate the margin cost to apple, whereas the iPad is a device wholly dependent on the app market)