RE: New CF5 Partner Hosting License

[Moneymaker, Jon S (WPNSTA Yorktown)]

<CFPARAM NAME="CF5 Partner Hosting License">
<cf_titanic>
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Let's hope not!

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Pierce [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 5:05 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: New CF5 Partner Hosting License


dBase and Sybase both thought they could increase their revenue by
increasing their price and look where it got them. You can only increase
your price when you don't have competition or you own significant market
share. For example, has anyone tried to buy a copy of MS Word 2000 for $99
or $69 with a competitive upgrade. Not recently.

When MS had competition, you could by Word dirt cheap. Now, no competition
and Word is bundled with a bunch of other stuff you may not want and even
upgrades can cost your $250 or more. SQL Server license with unlimited
connections could be had for less than $1,000 5 years ago. Today, you can
expect to pay $10,000 to $20,000 for a similar license. What changed, almost
no competition in the NT-based SQL market. You could buy NT server for less
than $500. Today, it can be $5,000. What changed, Novell is no longer a
threat. Now these are all Microsoft examples but ask yourself, who is
generally Allaire's competitor in this space. Is it IBM? How about
OpenSource PHP? Perhaps OracleDev?

So who has failed or is really struggling. Sybase, Ingres, cc:Mail, Banyan
Vines, Wang Imaging and many more all tried substantial increase in
licensing pricing when they ran into hard times. And look what happened.

Who else is struggling? Well Allaire for one. Macromedia's performance
hasn't been that stellar recently.

Sure management can think that increasing price will increase revenue, but
history of the software business will show that no company that has ever
tried a significant price increase ultimately succeeded. The folks at
Allaire and MM are very smart. But for them to believe that a price increase
strategy is a good thing is for them to be so arrogant as to assume that all
those other companies were run by stupid people. They weren't. In fact some
of those same folks now work at Allaire/Macromedia.

Cheers!

 - Steve




-----Original Message-----
From: Zac [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 1:42 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: New CF5 Partner Hosting License


Let me preface this by saying that it isn't meant as a comment about
Macromedia but is a general comment

> They HAVE to know that abandoning us (and yes, I'm definitely
> in the low end
> as well) will only result in the death of CF.

Publicly held software companies are beholden to their shareholders and the
bottom line. If the management of the company thinks that they can make more
money in a process that eliminates 90% of their small scale developers they
will do it. No question.

If the idea is sound in the long term is another matter entirely. And I
think you can look at the history of software development firms to see that
foresight and long-term planning are not necessarily skills that the
management of software companies have in excess.
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