Re: Cost of WDSCi (was Advanced vs. Standard)

I suppose the next question Joe, is, are customers buying IBMs development
tools? Whether thats WDSCi AE on the iseries, or RAD on other iseries or on
other platforms?

If not, what is the strategy behind pricing them so highly?

I agree with the general feeling that small/medium shops will never pay
$3500 for a development tool. They will struggle along with whats available
in the standard edition.

Maybe something like a 5722WDS Advanced Edition would be more sensible,
where you pay a higher fee for the the whole toolset, but then you can use
that as many times as you like within your shop. I imagine people would buy
into something like that.



On 02/03/07, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Colin Williams
>
> I presume the pricing issue is because RAD which it is based on is in
that
> sort of price range. Difficult to justify charging less for WDSCi, when
it
> actually has more functionality.

See, I don't buy this.  You can make that argument if the base product
actually has some material cost, but software has no intrinsic value
(other
than the fifteen cents for the CD, and with downloadable software there's
literally zero material cost).  Software is a completely different animal,
and EVERY copy, no matter its price, adds to the bottom line.

You are NOT going to sell RAD to all but a miniscule percentage of iSeries
developers.  And those people will buy the advanced edition no matter
what.
So you price RAD at whatever stupid price RAD is priced at.  That's the
other problem - RAD is WAAAAAAAAAAY overpriced to start with.

And the normal shops won't buy it.

However, you now have this base of code which you can sell, at ZERO
incremental cost, to an install base of many thousands of iSeries shops.
This is in effect found money for the Rational team.  But rather than take
a
few hundred bucks for each iSeries and make hundreds of thousands of free
dollars (and get goodwill and a great reference base to boot), they are
willing to kill the goose.

The problem is simple: whoever is in charge of the tools is unable to use
common sense to make decisions.

Joe

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