Key differentiation here is manufacture, not design.

Designing software's easy; writing it is hard and has edge cases and all that fun stuff. ;)

I see things like 'moocow01: free duplication isn't the same thing as it costing $0 to manufacture software. Software is "manufactured" almost exclusively on a one-off basis.

However, there are still similarities. New languages, frameworks, tools, etc, basically do the same thing to software as the $35 tablet represents in hardware. There are a lot of new tools in the past five or ten years that will let you quickly create something that's now seen as basic, but would've taken much more work to duplicate in the past.

In this context design means developing the product, manufacturing means shipping it. Manufacturing software really means copying the binary, which obviously doesn't cost very much...