Success Quote by Bill Budge

There is a sly provocation baked into Budge's amazement: he is pointing at a practice we now treat as ordinary and revealing how unnatural it actually is. Software is intangible, infinitely copyable, and often unfinished in the moment you receive it. Paying for it requires a collective agreement that code can be packaged like a toaster, owned like a book, and priced like a scarce good. Budge’s line works because it frames that agreement as a kind of mass, voluntary hallucination - not to insult buyers, but to spotlight how new and culturally constructed the idea once felt.

The intent reads as half marvel, half indictment. In an era shaped by hobbyist computing and early game development, “software” wasn’t yet a stable commodity; it was something you typed in from magazines, swapped with friends, or tweaked until it ran on your particular machine. Budge, coming from the business side, is essentially watching a market form in real time and registering disbelief at how quickly consumers accept frictionless goods being sold with hard-edged rules: licenses, DRM, “no returns,” proprietary formats.

The subtext also hints at a recurring tension in tech culture: the romance of openness versus the reality of monetization. The line anticipates today’s fights over subscriptions, microtransactions, and “software as a service.” The amazement lands because it isn’t just about paying for code; it’s about paying for trust - that the thing will work, be supported, and remain yours in some meaningful sense.