Quite recently a person I know (lets call him Joe) received a new laptop, which was purchased for him, by his business partner, in lieu of payment (its important to note that for all intent and purposes this is a ‘business laptop’ as it was purchased with the business funds and was invoiced to the business).
I’ve touch on business tools before, about how you really should have dedicated infrastructure like internet services and phone lines for your business, and not share this infrastructure with the rest of your home when you are in a home office (of course, certain things like electricity and water and heating etc are a bit hard to separate).
Today I’m going to cover a different angle – lets discuss the software you use on your business computer – and particularly – )did you pay for it?
A question was posed to me by Joe about Microsoft Office, does it come with the laptop etc, which I answered explaining the licensing etc, and said person went out and bought a copy of office – all things are good in the world.
Then there was a need for Photoshop to be installed on the laptop – after all, the editing of graphics, photos etc are a core part of this persons business. This turned out to be quite an issue, because… well Photoshop is an expensive piece of software – the last time I checked it was retailing for about AU$1,200 – but hey, its a big important tool and I’m pretty sure it cost a lot of money to develop. However, Joe didn’t want to pay so much for this software, and I was asked if I had a copy, or where he could find it and so on.
Lets just take a step back for a minute and consider something – I am a software developer – my lively hood more or less relies on people paying for and using my software, either directly or indirectly – so if I were to assist Joe in obtaining this software without paying for it then I would pretty much be hurting other developers – do you believe in Karma?
So, as you might expect I told Joe he should purchase the software, which Joe didn’t like, and an argument started boiling up – and currently I don’t actually think a good outcome has been found (but that is neither here nor there…).
The point which I want to get across is: Sure, the software is expensive, but you use this as a core part of your business why shouldn’t you pay for it?
Lets say Joe has a client paying him $6000 for a job, and 50% of that job involves graphics work with Photoshop – theoretically you could say that Joe is making $3000 by using Photoshop for the clients work (well, and the labour involved), and that if he didn’t use Photoshop, or any other tool, he wouldn’t really get that $3000. In this case, why should Adobe be expected to not receive payment for the product they created which is helping Joe make money?
Business is all about doing things properly – the right way, and keeping things legit. We’ve all seen companies go down because they tried to take dodgy shortcuts, done poor work, failed to look after their staff or clients – so if you are running a business then you should probably do it the right way, and pay for the tools you use, right?
Unfortunately the fallacy is that computers have become cheap – this may be right for home use, but for business they are still a very important tool and they still cost money.
So, my message to take home here is if you are using a software product for your business, then you should pay for it and be properly licensed- how would you feel, or how much would your business suffer, if people were taking your creations without paying you and then using them to make money for themselves? Eventually what goes around will come back around.
Take note of this Joe, seriously, just pay for the software – you wont actually miss the $1,200, and its actually a business expense, so use it for taxation purposes.
