What's up with Technology?
I mean, I like earning money almost as much as the next guy (and I mean "almost", because I genuinely don't care to earn more money than I can realistically spend in my lifetime), but some of the overpriced technology makes me want to holler!

Case in point:
A few years ago, I was a Network Administrator for an accounting firm. One of the users in another city was using Adobe Pagemaker to generate the firm's newsletter. So when a user in the home office was tasked to assist with the newsletter, I was asked to purchase a copy of Pagemaker for this user.
Off I go to Adobe's website, and at this time the upgrade from version 6.5 to 7.0 was happening, and I looked at the price. They wanted $699 for the full product. If it hadn't been for double-tempered, multipane safety glass windows, I probably would have crashed backward through the window and fell 16 stories! Seven hundred dollars for a program that doesn't really do a whole lot more that a $100 program. Then I was even more shocked to see that the upgrade price was only... $79!
Putting two and two together (or 700 and 80), I concluded logically that Pagemaker is NOT a $700 program; it's an $80 program. Since the vast majority of buyers are mainly current Pagemaker users, only a small percentage of buyers would be paying through their noses. If it were really a $700 program, (meaning Adobe NEEDS to charge that much to turn a profit), then surely they would go out of business with a quickness selling it to about 90% of buyers for only eighty bucks. So, they have an eighty dollar program, but they punish first-time users by charging them almost ten times that amount. It's sick.
Here's the second thing they do. Pagemaker has a wealth of great and powerful features, but the end result is not much better than what one could accomplish with a $100 program. But, you had better believe that trying to "teach yourself" to take full advantage of Pagemaker's features is a serious exercise in some serious futility. You can't do it. Why? Because Adobe built the program that way; unintuitive functions, "scenic route" methods and tiny little buttons tucked into nooks and crannies of the interface with no tooltips and nothing in the help file about them so you have no idea what they do. So how can you learn to use them? Either spend every waking hour for six months in trial and error (impractical) or pay $3500 to take a course or seminar on the product. Of course, who can justify doing this but someone who makes an actual living doing Desktop Publishing, and such persons are probably going to make very good money because they will be one of the few who really knows how to use the product. From a pure profit perspective, it's a brilliant idea!
If you're making 80 grand a year, you can afford not only the program, but the 3500 bucks for the training. If you're not making that kind of money, you can't afford either, so you won't learn to be good enough with the program to ever be worth that kind of money using it; get it? You'd certainly have no incentive to become one of the elite who can use it, because that's going to cost you eight hundred bucks, while the Pagemaker "guru", already having paid his or her dues, gets it for it's REAL price; eighty bucks.
The point of all this ranting is this: 90 percent of programs are overpriced, most by factors of tens. I know because I download and try/use 30 to 40 programs a month, everything from web development to utilities to audio to publishing to flash to networking to browsers to you just about name it. No one can convince me that it really costs Adobe, for example, six times what it costs Ulead Systems to make a photo editing program, but PhotoShop Sells for $600 and PhotoImpact (Ulead's product) sells for $90. Sure, PhotoShop does have several extra features, but I can tell you from my own experience as well as that of professional photographers I know, that PhotoImpact can do about 90% of everything PhotoShop can, and no one can tell the difference by looking at the end results.
Another example. I have decided to learn programming. I found and really liked a program called Omnis Studio. Great RAD tool with a pretty powerful scripting language. So, during the trial, I was building a test app, but in order to run it stand alone, I'd need the runtimes. No problem, I'd just wait until I finish the project and was ready for distribution. Then, for $250 I'd get the non-trial development environment and the runtimes. Well, obviously I intend to distribute my program, so when I looked into distribution, I find that (1) A runtime license will have to be purchased for EACH COPY of the program I distribute and (2) Each of these licenses costs $165!!! This makes it pretty stupid to be trying to build a program I want to give away, and another I was only going to charge 20 bucks for. That's when I decided to try another language/program. By this time, I'd already invested a month of intense study to learning the Omnis development tool, so I was a tad bit frustrated, to say the least.

I'm on something of a crusade, then. I really don't know why any software program should be worth more that maybe a hundred bucks, and that's for the high-end stuff. Anything more is both greedy and silly to me. Adobe, Macromedia and a few others are making money hand-over-fist, selling $60 programs for three and four hundred dollars. Of course, now that web developers are becoming cheaper by the dozen, and there are many programs that can allow a relative novice to at least put together a somewhat passable web site, you hardly see these self-styled "gurus" trying to gouge people for two and three hundred dollars per page (and then calling a "page" only what can print on a standard 8.5-by-11 sheet!) to build a site. With RAD tools, I look forward to much the same happening with application development, the tools making it easy enough so that only the very most difficult programming tasks can be handled by someone with substantial, but not superior, technical knowledge.
In my current position, I constantly rail against people paying for software functionality they can get for free. There is a great many programs I use for certain things that are free, and I refuse to pay for one unless it has a feature I really need, even then it better be a 30 dollar program. Why pay for a firewall, or antivirus, or email client, or calendar, or file manager or FTP or certain system utilities, when instead of paying at all (and some expect you to pay AGAIN each year), you can get the functionality FREE?
A lot of this is just ignorance; people just don't know. Well, if I have anything to do with it (and I do), that won't last much longer...

I'm sounding the bell!