They do have a well-proven track record of providing very good value for money, and I get the impression that they achieve the prices they do through ruthless optimisation of their processes. I'm curious to see how that culture extends to software engineering (Provided they do it in-house).
Certainly ruthless optimisation of their corporate structure with respect to tax helps contribute to their low prices: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139.
But it's nice to think that it could also be due to genuine technical ability.
Yeah, IKEA isn't really a saint, few corporations are. But they've done a lot of technical optimisation as well that should contribute to their low pricing. Flatpacks, big production runs, design stuff to be cheap to produce. A whole bunch of things.
And while I doubt their morals (corporations rarely have any) I generally have faith in their quality-to-price ratio. Not a resounding endorsement, just have had few problems.
And honestly if a company is going to evade or limit their taxes passing on part of the savings to consumers if fairly benevolent (if the tax avoidance contributes to the price as GP claims).
Only if the product is something which is generally useful and affordable for the entire population. Evading taxes on, say, megayachts and passing the savings on to the consumer doesn't seem particularly benevolent.
Yeah, I can imagine that if these things shake out well and I figure they should sell fine, IKEA will slowly add more and more software-driven stuff to their line-up.
No idea if that means in-house software engineering, I imagine it wouldn't as they want to keep prices low. Just heavy QA? Or they might eat the cost for local development since the software cost is pretty small and doesn't scale up with the number of units produced.
