by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-14 17:42:11+00:00
The article focuses on how the stock market may have much wider error bands than people thought for these companies, that conventional "pricing error" on those shares may be at work, but amazingly it could go either way.

If you look deeper at the fundamentals though, PC's were originally intended to be affordable for individual ownership, and programmable by the owner to accomplish anything the electronics was capable of.

This was supposed to go hand-in-hand from the beginning and grow into some kind of a brave new world.

Before there was actual commercial software to do what you needed to do, you were expected to acquire a personal computer primarily so you could program it yourself. Nothing could be better, it's your own personal electronics. Or if you were doing very common things, people started out sharing what they had written from the beginning, and it was going to be pretty cool when this grew to where anybody could draw upon that to get their own PC to do whatever anybody else had done previously.

Plus learn from the code as the electronics advanced, and best practices rose to the top.

The terminology "open source" wasn't needed at the beginning of personal computers, since the mainstream trend was open enough to lead to a better future than we have now. Plenty of stuff was confidential but the nail in the coffin was the extension of copyright to include software.

Which coincided with the effort to eliminate how easy it was for people to buy their first computer and start programming right out of the box, without the need for "installing" anything beforehand or ever loading or saving any code except their own.

Regardless, some of the commercial code that came along was worth money, especially to some business operators. It worked because sharing had been nipped in the bud, and well-heeled businesses were already usually wasting more money on other stuff that was foolish by comparison, so could realistically afford to give a commercial offering a chance.

It was not much of a leap to purchase and install software no differently than adding hardware like a sound card or something. You bought it, put it in, and you were done paying. When a PC was so compromised that you could no longer just open the box, put it on your desk and use it as a business machine, and made people dependent on installing stuff beforehand, even if all you wanted to do is program it yourself for your own business needs, it was that much less ideal. But people got used to it.

So the logical conclusion is that there are skyscrapers full of desks where people have been waiting decades so they can (once again) for the first time easily program their own computer their own way.

Like it was supposed to be.

Yes, it was supposed to be that kind of a game changer and the potential has been there the whole time.

Copyright simply worked to delay the inevitable until a workaround could become pervasive. AI.

Finally there's a light at the end of the tunnel for those who want to use the electronics to do more of what it was intended for in the first place.

Too bad it took so long but big money behind copyright was against progress in general.

Otherwise the vast majority of computer owners would have all progressed together learning programming at the same rate as the hardware advanced, and been doing it the whole time. AI might not have even taken so long to get good, but it also wouldn't make as much of a major stepwise impact when it piled on. If everybody with the least bit of ambition had always been programming it their own way from the beginning.

If the monopoly-favorable situation that arose wasn't extractive enough for decades, then there's SaaS. It's like the time-sharing condo investment of the business-machine world ;)

Where you get the least for your money and own almost nothing.

How much does the software turn out to be overpriced in the current highly nonideal environment?

Looks like by about $2 trillion more than it's worth.

It was barely affordable in a low-interest-rate high-growth environment, but with any slowdown there are plenty of high-rollers who want to stay that way and are going to jump at the first alternative that can cut back on their recurring outflow.

There's also a thing where you use the machine for what it was originally intended for and you just get more out of it. That's gotta be worth money itself, and really add up if you do the math.

Below the surface it's the pricing error of the software/service itself, where that error precedes the uncertainty of the shares on the stock market.