On Friday 22 September 2006 14:13, Cedric Meyerowitz wrote: > Horst, I think you missed my point. Maybe because I wrote badly. Most > Dr's will want to pay virtually nothing, no matter how good the service / > product. Same as our patients - they all want to be bulk-billed as they > feel it is a good price. Now imagine if they hear we all like open source > free software. They will further add to patients wanting free treatment.
Not my experience. When I occasionally visit another practice and e.g. fix their network, I invariably get offered money - generously. I invariably refuse, and invariably end up with some resort or restaurant voucher in the mail. Just wrote a small software piece for the local Division - I suggested a price and they paid without discussion. Guess if I would tell the Division that now they have to pay me $50/month for the rest of their lifes because they are gracefully allowed to use it, they'd show me (rightfully) the finger. There is only one thing really that has a tradeable value other than "natural resources" - that is life time. I traded a fraction of my life time (during which I happened to write that health directory software) against a fraction of the life time of whoever paid (during which the customer worked on something else that produced that money). I have no right to enslave the customer perpetually in exchange for that small fraction of life span I invested in creating that software. Sounds esoteric? Maybe. It's hard to explain. It's an ethical thing. For most doctors, it is very hard to estimate the value of things in IT. Most have been burned badly and repeatedly. They buy a printer only to find out that it is one of these useless "GDI" printers, works only on a specific version of Windows, and no drivers for future versions are developed - ever. Cheap printer - no; expensive paperweight. And so on. If IT people want a doctor's money they have to demonstrate that it is worthwhile and doctors will pay. That is my experience. If IT people have a business model based on extortion / lock in contracts - bad luck. They have to sell it cheap to get the suckers, the rest will ignore their offers, Different in the corporate world - they love lock-in contracts because they are predictable, costs can be budgeted long term etc. But doctors are not coprporates. We are *efficient* in most things we do. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
