I think it's a "swinging pendulum" sort of effect, and at some stage it will have to swing back a bit the other way (unless we discover free energy, and all live lives of leisure).
When I left university in 1989, my first job was for a computer company, and at the time I guess most of what we were selling was PC-AT compatible, with a few 386s for the people who thought they were high powered. A desktop PC would cost around £2,500 and a copy of a major software package like Lotus 1-2-3 was £239 - in other words, back then the cost of a piece of software was, roughly, 10% of the cost of the hardware you used to run it.
Over time, both software and PCs have become more complicated, but despite increasing volumes, the cost of software for desktops increased as a percentage - if you were to buy Excel 2013 on its own, you could easily buy a PC capable of running it for five times the cost of the software.
In the world of mobile apps, things have gone completely the other way. We have a situation now where (in common with other areas of life) the time people spend creating something is not valued at all; users post a one star review and say they feel ripped off because they spent 99 pence on something, and it only entertained them for a few hours, or object with outrage that having had full use of an app for a couple of years for just £2.49, the author has the gall to announce that there will be a charge to upgrade to the latest version.
Neither of these extremes is, in my view, sustainable over the long term. To produce a polished app often requires the resources of more than one person, unless you're one of the rare coders that's also great at graphic design, for example. 70% of a low price is unlikely to keep two people fed and clothed, while in the PC market, more and more people don't actually need the latest version of an app; I write for a living, and use Word 2008, because I don't need anything newer, so what's the point wasting money? For most people, Windows 8/8.1 falls into the same bracket - their PC works fine, so why bother, and the same is true for much other software.
I'd love to say I have a solution for how things can be pushed back to the middle ground, where software is affordable on all platforms, so the people who create it can devote their time to it, and actually make a living. Sadly I don't.
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