This recent BBC news report announces the decision of UK leading grocery brand - Tesco’s immersion into the software production industry. While supermarket giants worldwide such as Tesco, No Frills, Shopper’s Drug Mart all usually stick a hand in manufacturing their own cheaper-than-brandname alternatives of household products like tissue, soap, pasta and canned soup etc, and occasionally into more macroscopic products like furniture and electronics, but so far, cheaper-than-brandname software is unheard of. Could this eventually lead to a new type of software market where people go bargaining and comparing prices for cheap software as if it were any other grocery product? However considering the state of the current software industry environment right now, I foresee their future in this market area to be rather gloomy. Here are three main reasons why I doubt their rate of success would be high:

1. Lower software standards compared to brandnames
First of all, since their target audience would be for people looking for cheaper software alternatives, I hold doubts to the integrity and extensiveness of their software functionality implementation. Their office suite would probably provide only basic word processing or spreadsheet tools with less focus on versatility as larger brands would.

2. High rate of software piracy
Though not necessarily a problem faced only by Tesco software, piracy has been giving a hard time to all software developers, including leaders like Microsoft. In the real market, it would already have been quite difficult for Tesco to surpass Microsoft, not to mention all the illegal software people download off the internet. Piracy is a very hard problem to combat

3. Abundance of open source or free software
Finally, even if piracy manages to be solved, this puts Tesco software no closer to gaining a fair share of the software market. Thanks to open source software, as well as companies like Google who put an effort into developing free online web applications, who would want to pay anything at all if we could get them for free legally? However cheap Tesco sets their software to be, it will never come as close to being cheap as free software does.

In conclusion, I appreciate the idea and marketing effort of Tesco to produce more and more lower cost alternatives just to add competition to the market. However, their timing just isn’t right.

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