“The best philosopher in India, to the best of my knowledge, is Anu Engineer, not a common dustman.” -Archis Gore
On my last day at Microsoft, Anu Engineer explained a very important concept to me – one that makes more and more sense to me the more I think about it.
The discussion was about value. What is “value”? Why do people pay for anything? What makes them pay for it? Are they bare necessities for survival? Not really. People don’t really pay a lot for food, water and shelter (well, not if you’re willing to live a moderate lifestyle).
So what is the most valuable thing in the world? It’s emotion. If there were a world where machines would grow food, and clean houses and do all that stuff, then people would not pay for anything. Machines would do everything for us. But there would still be one thing they would pay for - emotions.
You see, art is valuable only due to the sentimentality attached to it. If one were to try and evaluate the value of art in terms of the amount of mouths it can feed if it were possessed, then nobody would possess it. The value of art is in it’s pure exclusivity. Art can be copied – but not replicated (anyone who’s spent time thinking over what is a scientific experiment will know these two terms very well). There can be no other Mona Lisa. Leonardo Da Vinci is dead. That makes it all the more impossible (if he were alive there would still be that minor chance of replication).
Apart from the fact that Mona Lisa is the one of it’s kind painting in the world and only one person can possess it at one time, it has no value – at least no material value to speak of. The canvas, the wooden frame, the glass casing, etc. should not cost more than a few thousand dollars – assuming we buy very expensive stuff for it. The medium itself is completely crap. The material on which art is built has absolutely no value.
Hence, software is like art. Software itself comes on cheap CDs costing around Rs. 10 each or nowadays a DVD costing Rs. 25. The material value of software is complete crap. The only reason the software industry survives is because of the emotional value attached to it. Software is art. Every developer has his own coding style. Every developer implements the same algorithm in drastically different ways. This is the real value of software.
Software becomes unique because hundreds of developers develop the same functionality in very different ways. This is how they innovate. This is how the world grows. This is where the value comes from. So in case you want to make a lot of money from software, remember to bank on emotions. Software itself has no intrinsic value. If what you’ve done can be copied and replicated, then it is worthless. What makes it so valuable is that only you can write it. Only you have the skills to understand it. Could not another capable painter paint the Mona Lisa once again? But it would still be worthless. Why? Because you’d say, “But it’s not the ‘real’ thing.” As you can see, what is very valuable is the “real” thing. From where I stand, this is a purely emotional issue. What makes Michael Jackson’s jeans so valuable during an auction? Is the material made of gold? Is it made of expensive stuff Batman’s suit is made of? Absolutely not! In reality, Bruce Wayne’s Bat-suit is monetarily a lot more expensive. It’s all emotional. The “real” Michael Jackson jeans are expensive due to emotions.
This is a very valuable lesson for anyone in the software industry. Software, as the name implies, is soft. It has no material existence. It has no physical significance. It’s value is emotional. Only he who understands this will become very big in this industry.
