What MM should release an enterprise server version for the product for $695
with no support. If you want support buy an annual contract. Would you
rather sell 10 copies at $695 with no support or 1 copy at $6,000?
Then get in the business of developing training classes, books, development
tools, and all the other gleeples that the corporate world loves to buy. But
make it very cost effective for ISP's to deploy massive server farms in the
field for shared and dedicated hosting.
It ought to be an automatic deal, when setting up a server farm you buy the
hardware, the OS, install a webserver and then CF. You want to be at a point
where it is just automatic, you wouldn't think of deploying a server without
CF support. Just as almost anyone will tell you right now, if you want to be
into shared hosting on any sort of scale, you better support FrontPage.
There is plenty of market to be had in a reasonably priced software product
that facilitates rapid deployment of customized web apps. What MM fails to
realize is that most employees can buy a software package for under $1,000
with 'mad' money. But anything over $5,000 in most corporate and government
sites is considered a capital investment, and so it requires different level
of approvals and accounting.
Look at all the traffic this price increase has generated. Now think for a
moment, what if MM had released the same FAQ on Friday saying:
"CF5 Enterprise is going to be $695.00"
Them MM should announce, We don't offer support, you get free upgrades to
service packs, but you will pay retail for any major updates or need to buy
an annual license, and each copy has a license checker to prevent running
the same copy on multiple servers. That would force a number of folks to get
their licenses in order, especially at hosting companies.
If MM made this announcement, all of sudden you would think that MM is the
smartest company in the world. That MM is the only company with a vision to
understand this development market and all us would be dancing around
patting ourselves on the back for being so smart for buying CF in the first
place.
But that didn't happen this weekend. Yet I could have sworn I heard a quiet
"whew" up in Redmond just after the CF FAQ was published.
Logic says if you need to generate more revenue raise your price. I can show
you a number of companies that when they tried to use that logic, and their
products did not dominate the market, they failed. If McAllaire wants to
survive and better still grow, they need to lower their price and increase
market share. I am not advocating giving the software away, that is stupid.
But it needs to be priced from $495 to $995 and then sell the living
daylights out of the stuff.
later,
- Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 4:51 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: New CF5 Partner Hosting License
> As I keep saying - look what happened to Netscape Navigator
> vis a vis Internet Explorer - Netscape's entire business model
> collapsed it seems because IE was bundled and free. The same
> applies to CF v ASP and to a lesser extent PHP.
I'm not sure what lesson can be drawn from this. CF isn't free, because some
company, with employees and stockholders, makes it. ASP isn't free, in any
meaningful sense, either - just try to download a version for the platform
of your choice, if it isn't Windows. PHP is free because it doesn't come
from a company, and there are no employees and stockholders to satisfy.
There's also no need for the PHP development team to directly satisfy the
PHP user community, although they may certainly want to, given the free time
and resources. But if they don't, none of them will be out of a job, will
they.
So, are you suggesting that the Allaire arm of MM should:
1. discharge everybody providing development and tech support services for
CF,
2. not pay any of those people,
3. fund further development and support from the sales of their ubiquitous
desktop OS (oh, wait a second...)
None of those sound too likely to me.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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