Re: George Farr declaresfeaturespecificpricingonhorizonfor WDSC -- WDSCI-L

Aaron,

You said :" those tools need to be paid for whether it be through anannual purchase of SW Maint, compiler purchase, or off the shelf featurepricing."

I am not sure I completely agree. Paid for, yes. But the license feeis is minuscule compared to what IBM really wants here: Hardware andservices sales. This is what baffles me a bit with hardware andservices companies. It's the old razor blades and razors analogy. Ifyou give away the razor, you make your money on the blades. I think ifIBM is struggling with System i adoption, then having MORE applicationsthat drive hardware sales would be a logical way to encourage sales. AGREAT way to encourage development of "must have" applications is togive away the tools to develop them with.Microsoft did just this early on in its developer program. The toolswere practically free and guess what, there are a ton of .NET developersbecause of that. There might be better tools at higher prices now, butthe initial developer program was "seeded' by free tools and they arestill easy ways to get a free copy of the tools now. A copy of thestandard version of Visual Studio can be had by sitting in a webcast. AFull copy of Visual Studio Professional is only $799.00 retail. VS 2005application development leads to more Microsoft-centric applications andtherefore more OS and Office sales. Beautiful!

If IBM would think outside the box a bit here they could solve not onlythis new thorny issue of WDSc pricing but solve the larger issue of whySystem i sales are not meeting expectations.


Pete Helgren


albartell wrote:

I can see I have hit a sensitive spot with you John, but in my defense I
have only been a contractor for a couple years now.  I have lived where you
are living.  You must also understand that every shop that I go into may not
have the money for the things that I am in support of, which will inevitably
mean I will not be able to use the WDSC tooling when working for them.

Am I drinking WDSC Kool-Aid?  Maybe.  I have drank Java Kool-Aid before and
thrown it up years later.  I think the reality of the situation is this: No
money to pay developers, no second-to-none tooling.  Am I fine with most of
what I have today in WDSC, yes.  But they (WDSC dev team) might be able to
raise their development to the next level (concerning feature sets) and if
that costs me more $$ to get it in 1yr vs. 5yrs then many would say it is
worth it.

My previous employer is making a grand switch to .NET.  Wanna know why?
Tooling/Software.  Plain and simple.  Microsoft has some pretty nice
integration amongst all of their products and I can see why the decision was
made.  What if IBM would have had the tooling available to them two years
ago?  They wouldn't have had to introduce an entirely new development
environment into the scenario which costs a lot of $$$.

I guess in the end we both are on the same page, just getting there through
different means.  We both agree that somehow those tools need to be paid for
whether it be through an annual purchase of SW Maint, compiler purchase, or
off the shelf feature pricing.  Note that I am not saying that you agree
with me on the pay-by-feature deal:-) It will be interesting to see where it
goes.

Aaron Bartell