Here is my thinking, and having this aired out here has helped some on working through this.
1. Adoption of the language is the one thing that I as an investor in a technology platform is looking for. High prices seem to work against that. read everett rodgers "diffusion of innovation" it covers everything for diffusion it is a classic. 2. Stability of the platform. ie memory leaks etc, scalability. lack of wierd bugs (ie like the one i post and have not seen any comments on). Based on my CF experience, I see that as a realistic possible problem area. 3. I think the "commodity nature" of software is moving up the application stack. ie, hardware is pretty much a commodity, competition is based on price. OS's are heading that way espicially with Linux on the scene. Databases are going that way. and it seems that the middle layer tools are heading that way, laszlo, j2EE, .NET. if you look at the industry the big players are heading upstream. they are doing applications. look at the companies that microsoft is buying, look at who oracle is buying. Based on this it seems that the Laszlo business model makes way more sense. get the tools out there, charge for applications built on top of it. 4. what a business wants is solutions to needs. no business user comes to us in IT and says, I need you to go buy a new development tool. They say I need to add this new feature or offering. I need to eliminate costs. etc. So even if I could spend 80k on a software package, at the end of the day once it is installed it does not solve a single problem for the business. 5. The people that endorse a technology and get it in the door, really do tie thier livelihood and future to the results of that decision. And it is really disconcering to those people who have put the well being of thier family on the line, to see the vendor act in flakey ways. raising prices, de-emphasiszing products, having massive bugs and memory leaks show up at the last minute, jeopordize project failure on really large projects with limited scalability, that maybe know but is glossed over because that is the plan for later. That makes people edgy. that is probably why you get really emotional responses to price change announcements. I have been pretty well rewarded for using cold fusion in the past. it is a great language. but a huge memory leak with handling of COM almost cost me dearly a few years back. it completely bucked under our real world load. the server crashed every 2 hours and needed to be rebooted. Macromedia opened a bug ID for it. it took almost 4 months to get a fix from them. in the meantime, I tracked down cfx_xslt. I contacted the developer, had him make a small mod. and it was completely resolved, no memory leak within 2 days from contacting him. charge for the product.. no kidding.. $49. I knwo someone at macromedia is cringing that he did not find out how deep my pockets might have been and charged me 100 times that amount. But the point of that story is that the bug almost made the entire project a failure, and the best support could do was a fix 4 months later. could flex do this to me? maybe. am i taking on some personal risk for the sake of this product. 100% yes. --Dennis --- In [email protected], Vinny Timmermans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have started many discussions on Flex pricing, and contributed heavily to > each and every other previous Flex pricing post, because I was convinced > that Flex pricing killed my and other Flex lovers' opportunities. The reason > why I did not contribute until so far is simple. I have experienced that for > hot opportunities Macromedia is willing to work out the right deal for you > and your customer. They don't kill your opportunities. This is a proven > fact. So if you think Flex may be the right solution for your customer's > business problem, don't let the pricetag intimidate you. Contact Macromedia > and work it out! > > The real threat, however, comes from a different corner. High price tags > might frighten developers to seriously invest in Flex. Return on investment > may seem far lower than from investing in any other platform. The number of > experienced, professional Flex developers is low at the moment and may not > rise fast enough to realize all Flex opportunities that pop-up in the market > in the coming years. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that Macromedia > will provide a range of other Flex packages soon. From low-cost (stripped > down server-based versions) to no-cost (just mxml compilation without > server-based features; the developer-centered Flash alternative). The > critical success factor in the next period is not the Flex price tag, but > the number of experienced, highly qualified developers out there that master > MXML and AS2 and can rapidly create the killer applications Flex can offer. > Don't make it a second ColdFusion: powerful platform, excellent programming > language, not enough developers. > > Vinny Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
