Re: Cost of RDP

On 7/5/2011 5:33 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:

On 7/5/2011 2:57 PM, Buck wrote:

On 7/1/2011 1:03 PM, Brian Parkins wrote:

A number of folk appear to be “stuck” on WDSc v7, or forced back on
to WDSc when their 60-day trial of RDP ends. Purely out of personal
curiosity, what would the price of RDP have to be to encourage you to
purchase it yourself?

[buck]

Me, personally? I'd spend $99 US for RDp. I'd spring for an upgrade
fee of $49 if the improvements warranted it for me personally. I'm not
beating up Rational over their pricing - they need to show a profit -
I'm answering what I'd personally pay for the current product for
personal use.

SlickEdit charges $299 to purchase a single named user licence and then
you can choose to either pay annual maintenance of $90 which entitles
you to upgrades as they come out, or you can pay the upgrade fee to get
the new version, which seems to vary by version but is currently around
$129.
--buck

[Joe]

Okay, I'm intrigued. Why do you think SlickEdit is worth three times
the cost of RDP? (Or do you?) Yes, SlickEdit supports 40 languages,
but I'm betting the support is very vanilla - it has to do with plugging
in one syntax tree for another. And it's not likely I'll use more than
a few of those, anyway. RDP provides not only multiple languages, but
also some very language-specific capabilities, whether it's expansion of
BIFs in RPG or prompting of CL. Not to mention the whole remote
explorer view, with its filters and whatnot, and more importantly the
integrated debugging, especially the SEP support.

Sooooo... $300 and a 30% per year maintenance fee for a fantastic source
editor, or $870 and a 20% maintenance fee for a fantastic editor and
debugger that supports all of my languages and provides debugging and
object management besides.

Not sure that Rational is all that far off the mark. And your take is
that you'd only pay $100 for the Rational product. I don't quite get it.

I didn't buy SlickEdit. I was pointing out a software vendor who
apparently makes money at that price point, and has done so for quite
some time.

As Lpex/RSE stands today, it's not worth more than $100 to me. There's
no regular expression scan/replace (only the scan), no macro capability
and not a whisper of support for helping refactor RPG code. All of
those omissions lower the value of Lpex to me personally. SEP is the
bright spot in an otherwise average IDE. Not fantastic, average. My
opinion, which is not insulting yours! This is personal opinion based
on what I do (edit, compile and test RPG). Yes, WDSC is better than
PDM/SEU but that's a very, very low bar. All in all, I only use WDSC
because of SEP and inertia. I fire up Code/400 when I need to spin a
Rexx macro over my code but I pretty much never use the green screen
debugger.

This is not a slam of the IDE. I still like my WDSC and use it almost
exclusively. I've been using this beast since the OS/2 days. It's my
personal perception that the 7.0.0.8 Lpex is not as good as Code/400 (no
macro support) but that RSE is better than PDM (SEP FTW!) Based on what
I do, which is edit, compile and test RPG code, if I had to choose to
buy RDP (which has no RPG-related improvements I would use) my personal
price point would be $100. If Rational were to charge more than that,
I'd use Notepad++ and the IBM graphical system debugger, both free. It
would require writing some macros in Python for the
upload/download/compile functionality of RSE but I'm vain enough to
think I could do that fairly quickly.

--buck