Re: Counting users - rip-off

> Why do you consider this a rip-off. Purchasing licenses for a predetermined 
> number of users is one of the market norms, for ANY platform

If the nature of your enterprise is such that ALL YOUR COMPUTER USERS will 
need to use the SAME SOFTWARE PACKAGE then it is reasonable for the vendor to 
price their software based on the power of the platform & number of users on 
it.

But if the nature of your enterprise is such that you need a computer system 
powerful enough to support MULTIPLE SOFTWARE PACKAGES each with different 
bunches of users, and a few overlaps where some people use more than one 
package, but very few users in all of them, then this pricing model is saying 
you need to have different software packages on DIFFERENT COMPUTERS so that 
none of the computers exceed the user count that any one package is imposing 
on the total box network.

This flies in the face of the reasons why companies might be encouraged to 
network computers.

Thus, the decision whether to have all the packages on one computer system, 
or to have different computer systems for different packages, needs to factor 
in what pricing methods the packages are using.

Riddle me this.
You have a home PC & it has enough power to do word processing & spread sheet 
comfortably.  You decide to get a more powerful Pentium & other hardware 
ingredients so that you can download graphical pages from the internet faster.
Your Windows Vendor notices that you are now on a more powerful PC box & 
demands a higher software license price because you are getting more value 
from Windows because you are now getting more value from everything on that 
box.  Is that fair & reasonable?  A lot of 400 software is priced that way.

Or put it another way.
You have a network of PCs.
A handful of clients are doing accounting software
Another handful are doing Auto Cad engineering work
A few more are doing payroll

Should the payroll software be priced based on 2-3 people using the software, 
the fact that you have 50 clients on the network even though only 2-3 are 
using this particular software, or the fact that you have 1,000 employees in 
the payroll master?

The sense of rip-off is that many people have been accustomed to paying for 
software on one basis, and now some company jacks up the price.

I think a license for software support should be related to the number of 
people who are likely to be calling the vendor for tech support, or sending 
questions to MIS to forward to the vendor.  In the payroll example, 2-3 is 
the number of users of the software, plus perhaps management personnel 
outside the users who might want to know if the package can be upgraded to 
support this or that idea not now being exploited.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)


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