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Good Lord - why do you need a key at all? Do you *really* think that large shops are going to try to stiff you over a support fee, or that small shops are really going to have so many users? If you do, then think out of the box. (1) Visit the site if you are afraid it is a large site. Get the facts. Then set up a charge per incident, or per hour for support with them. (2) Get the facts, if the site has a large machine because they have to process something really fast, but only a small number of users, charge appropriately. (3) If a site has multiple machines running the same product, charge support by the number of users, or more likley, do #1 above. Let the customer decide what a support incident is worth. Of course, you better be *very* sure you provide good support in the cases above, because if you don't, then you are likely to wind up loosing a customer, or having a customer who refuses to contract with you for support. In my experience, which I bashfully admit covers about 20 years now, we have dumped companies when they screwed us over, not when support or their product because or started off rather expensive. IBM still has good support, though often you have to deal with two levels of filtering before you get where you want to do. Heck, they just came out with the 'Consult Line" service recently, where they will help you with *anything*, at a (for IBM!) reasonable hourly fee. You want them to research how to do XYZ? Sure thing, they will find someone who knows something about it and set them on it. I don't know how successful that will be, but I suspect it will be very sucessful. Even Microsoft does that, for $250 per incident. Management of software companies are facing a totally new world with the incursion of open source software, which is what I think is the primary driver right now. How to compete in a world where the *cost* of the software itself is insiginfigant, but getting expert support is a critical need? It is something a lot of us are learning, and yes, a few, maybe a lot of customers are going to get burned a little. Mostly customers whose companies are ran by clueless bean counters in my opinion, but then, you have already guessed I have strong opinions on this subject. <grin> And I said *clueless* beancounters - not people who really research the issues and give it thought. -Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: <thomas@inorbit.com> To: <midrange-l@midrange.com> Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 12:12 AM Subject: Re: Fair software pricing models Paul: On Wed, 31 October 2001, "Paul Raulerson" wrote: > What about the simple way, flat fee and charge appropriately for support. I'm not clear on your point. You mean support pricing should be tiered? How should it be enforced? If I have a P05 and a P50 but only buy support for the P05, am I not covered? Would I need a "support license" key that expired annually? How calculated? (A vendor certainly wouldn't set support price higher than the purchase price.) Would small customers or large pay higher support fees? Tom Liotta > ----- Original Message ----- > From: <thomas@inorbit.com> > > Okay, so what's fair? Per user? Per concurrent user? Per instance? Flat > rate? And how is it billed? And how should it be enforced? -- Tom Liotta The PowerTech Group, Inc. 19426 68th Avenue South Kent, WA 98032 Phone 253-872-7788 Fax 253-872-7904 http://www.400Security.com ___________________________________________________ The ALL NEW CS2000 from CompuServe Better! Faster! More Powerful! 250 FREE hours! Sign-on Now! http://www.compuserve.com/trycsrv/cs2000/webmail/ _______________________________________________ This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options, visit: http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-l or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@midrange.com Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.
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