On 20/01/2006, at 5:09 PM, Dale Fraser wrote:
Exactly,
I bet not one person here has a licensed server of Breeze.
We're in the process of buying one for a client at the moment. I
know of at least fourteen servers had been sold by a Sydney based
Alliance partner, and that was a good while back. I would happily buy
it for that price if RocketBoots had a business case to go with it.
It's a great product, but 32k? It's not rocket science.
Plumbers spend three times that setting up their van. You have to
spend money to make money. A typical lease on 32k would be less than
5k a year (we do software financing for clients btw). If a business
plan with global meeting and training capability can't support an
expense like that, perhaps the business plan is the issue?
I think it's only customer is Macromedia / Adobe, haven't seen
anyone else
use it other than people within Macromedia.
That's not rocket science either. Why should someone buy Breeze and
then use it making presentations for you to watch? You see
Macromedia use Breeze because it's their job to demonstrate and sell
it to people. An obvious place to start looking for Breeze users is
here:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?
event=finderresults&contenttype=casestudy&productID=1520&loc=en_us
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of M@ Bourke
Sent: Thursday, 9 February 2006 4:50 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [cfaussie] Re: OT: Macromedia Pricing
I can kind of understand MM having high pricing and aiming at the
big corp
end of the market,
If you watched the quarterly earnings Breezos this seems to have
achieved very nice results for Flex and Breeze.
but the thing is, it scares all the smaller guys off
and by the time the pricing is cheaper, the smaller guys are using a
competing product and the bigger guys are Pi$$ed off that they
paid so
much and now its so cheap or free etc.
Well actually the big guys don't mind because being generally good at
business they understand that it costs a hell of a lot of money to
develop products like Flex and Breeze, Macromedia/Adobe have to
recoup that money, and as owners of the IP they're then free to
distribute it as they like.
On 1/20/06, Dale Fraser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Robin,
Flex also started with outrageous prices.
Breeze isn't 13.5 times better, as the price might indicate, I
actually
think goto meeting is better, breeze doesn't allow you to save your
meetings
locally which means you need to subscribe forever to keep them.
Gotometting does.
Regards
Dale Fraser
Well, after that comprehensive summary of gotomeeting's features ;-)
I had to take a look. After providing my credit card and billing
address information for my free trial they then tell me that my
operating system (OS X) is not supported - so I don't even get to see
how big the download is, presumably an executable (well it can save
files locally) a lot larger than Breeze (some of the places I've been
selling Breeze to don't allow downloading exes, oh well).
To make sure we're comparing Apples to Apples then, I looked at the
links to the goto meeting corporate licensing, which seems more
comparable to Breeze with it's multiple administrator capability and
fewer restrictions on number of participants. Ooh, that's so
expensive that they don't list the price, you have to talk to one of
their sales people, who unfortunately are only available in US
business hours. At least our relationship is off to a good start -
they have my credit card number already.
I don't know, 64 AUD a month seems expensive when I can get Skype and
VNC for free - and it works on OS X. If it's anything like the
Citrix experience at my local Apple dealership (where typing an order
into their order system seems to cause a level of pain in the
operator that I would not have expected this side of the upper planes
of Hell) or any of the many presentation via screen-sharing (unlike
Breeze, which converts the presentation into a swf and preloads
slides into the Flash client) solutions I've experienced over the
years I think I'll pass it up.
...
Here's my take on pricing:
- Everyone, including Adobe, Citrix, Microsoft, Linus Torvalds and
members of cfaussie are free to choose what to do with the software
they create. Any time Adobe likes they can and will change their
pricing or position to suit the climate, the Flex 2 SDK and joining
the Eclipse foundation being a recent example, I'd expect anyone on
this list in their own business would behave in the same manner.
- You are all free to choose how you spend your money.
- Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe have on several occasions positioned
products in the Enterprise space with their pricing. On some
occasions it turned out as a bad decision (e.g. Generator, Media
Server - latter now being fixed, former RIP). On others it turned
out well, and especially so with Breeze and Flex. The facts are that
these products have been extremely successful at this price
financially and otherwise. Flexcoders is probably the busiest
mailing list I've ever subscribed to.
- Each time there have been complaints on this list about the
decision. Yes the pricing doesn't suit everyone - but then it is
really very unrealistic to expect that every product produced by a
company will be targeted at you. Yes there is room for competitors
to come in at a lower price (BlueDragon, mtasc) or with better
features (CFEclipse, FDT) - that's fine, and if it makes sense for
you (after doing some research), you should use these products. You
can even drop someone at Adobe a friendly email explaining your
decision, and more likely or not you'll get a thanks for the
information.
- Ask yourself if the situation was reversed how would you react - if
people on the list were really disappointed that you were charging X
(an "outrageous" price of course) for your you-beaut tag library you
spent months building which was selling like hotcakes at the price?
What if they posted to a list suggesting that the product was
probably going to fail at that price, without even asking you how it
was going or checking out the level of activity on the support
newsgroup? What if you'd only announced a few days previously that
you were going to be giving the next version away for free in a few
months time and they were still disappointed?
Would you say perhaps "Huh"? Your spouse/business partners/
shareholders who supported your development efforts with forbearance
or hard cash might put even a finer point on it.
Discussing pricing on CFAussie is not off topic - it's important to
all of us. I just find the expectations about pricing a bit out
there, and sometimes it's evident that people are shooting from the
hip and can't back up what they're saying - the number of times I've
read here that Flex is failing as a product when I've just seen the
quarterly results presentation and my inbox is overflowing with
Flexcoders posts is legion. If you're going to post a criticism of
Adobe or the products on a list with hundreds of users on it, at
least please spend a bit of time putting it together and post it with
constructive intent. Not doing so is a bit in-the-face for people
who talk-up the technology and put lots of effort into running and
sponsoring conferences and user groups, releasing open-source
projects (or working at Adobe - selling software for money you'd
think most of them would have sold their soul to the Devil by now but
surprisingly quite a few of them are not servants of the antichrist
and have feelings/love their products).
I realise this is a bit of a rant, the thread just got my goat a
because I've been pulling a lot of late nights preparing for mxdu and
days on a very large Flex project (with a bit of Breeze too) and the
assertions seemed a bit out of whack with reality, or at least my
version of it (4.3.2 SP2981). I know you're all nice people, please
take this for the earnest, non-flame inducing response I intended it
to be. BTW I may also take a while to respond to further posts while
I sort out these strange amounts on my credit card statement.
Regards,
Robin
______________
Robin Hilliard
Director - RocketBoots Pty Ltd
Professional Services for Macromedia Technologies
http://www.rocketboots.com.au
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