[thayne]

No it isn't scarce. There isn't a limited supply. There is no point at which the software company would say "sorry, we're out of stock". Unless maybe you are selling physical media with the software on it. With SaaS, possibly you are constrained by the capacity of your infrastructure, but that isn't usually a practical concern unless you have incredibly unexpected growth.

[bruce511]

Well, for closed-source software there's a scarcity of suppliers, not supply.

The value is not in "a copy of windows" it's that all copies of windows come from one supplier.

Yes there can be competing products, that achieve the same goals, or there may be scarcity there too.

Of course, even when achieving the same goals, some products are more desirable than others. There's no scarcity of OS options, but some would seem to be more popular.

[thayne]

"a copy of windows" is what you pay for (well, what you pay for a license to use). And there isn't a scarcity of copies of windows.

[davidw]

It has had artificial scarcity introduced to provide an incentive to create it. It's certainly an imperfect system in many ways, but it kinda sort does create scarcity that drives revenue which pays programmers to keep working on the software.