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

                Joe,

I agree with you 100%. IBM going with Rational is thier business decision which 
should be for the better of the developers not worse. Also someone made the 
point to give development tools away to make the computer stronger. MS has 
figured this out and now gives away some version of thier Development Studio as 
well as does Sun to promote Java. While IBM does give thier tool away they seem 
to miss the boat on who should get the free version and what they would use it 
for. Anything done on the I5 should be free (ie Screen Design and Print File 
Design and even RPG Navigator in my opinion).

Don N.

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                                From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 7:45 PM
To: "'Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries'" <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Cost of WDSCi (was Advanced vs. Standard) 

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