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<snip> This flies in the face of the reasons why companies might be encouraged to network computers. <endsnip> No, it really doesn't. Instead of one big server, you network. For example, one of the reasons that our EDI runs on a separate 400 here is to avoid tiered pricing. Rob Berendt ================== A smart person learns from their mistakes, but a wise person learns from OTHER peoples mistakes. MacWheel99@aol.com Sent by: To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com owner-midrange-l@mi cc: drange.com Subject: Re: Counting users - rip-off 08/01/2001 12:52 PM Please respond to MIDRANGE-L > 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) +--- | This is the Midrange System Mailing List! | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com. | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com. | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com. | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com +--- +--- | This is the Midrange System Mailing List! | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com. | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com. | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com. | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com +---
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