Comment by davidw
3 days ago
I don't think it's necessarily a market for lemons. That involves information asymmetry.
Sometimes that happens with buggy software, but I think in general, people just want to pay less and don't mind a few bugs in the process. Compare and contrast what you'd have to charge to do a very thorough process with multiple engineers checking every line of code and many hours of rigorous QA.
I once did some software for a small book shop where I lived in Padova, and created it pretty quickly and didn't charge the guy - a friend - much. It wasn't perfect, but I fixed any problems (and there weren't many) as they came up and he was happy with the arrangement. He was patient because he knew he was getting a good deal.
I do think there is an information problem in many cases.
It is easy to get information of features. It is hard to get information on reliability or security.
The result is worsened because vendors compete on features, therefore they all make the same trade off of more features for lower quality.
Some vendors even make it impossible to get information. See Oracle and Microsoft forbidding publishing benchmarks for their SQL databases.
There's likely some, although it depends on the environment. The more users of the system there are, the more there are going to be reviews and people will know that it's kind of buggy. Most people seem more interested in cost or features though, as long as they're not losing hours of work due to bugs.