I respect your oh so educated opinion. I would, however, appreciate you posting the obviously extensive research you did to come up with your numbers. I, myself had no idea that it was so inexpensive to pay programmers to work so much on a product that requires so much attention and support. After all, Facebook so rarely changes things on their website, and they never turn around and change things back because of user complaints or the uncovering of bugs. I am certain that GW Micro will not have to spend nearly as much time fixing and debugging things as time goes on. The list traffic on problems caused by Facebook changes and bugs since the product was first released has been so rare. I am convinced that they won’t spend anytime on keeping this product up to date and on making sure it works right with every other product people use with it to access the site. No problem.
OK, serious, they have people on staff who primarilly are working with just this one product. That costs money. How well do you think it would go over if they told their employees that they would only pay them once per subscription? You are entitled to your opinion, but I just wonder how much of a background you have in running a business, developing, selling and supporting products. Over and over again, people seem to think that since software is just a bunch of 1s and 0s, that it should be free or cheap, but everything costs time and money, even time costs money., and before NVDA is brought up, guess what, open source free software still costs. It is simply that successful open source products get all of the time and money required donated. It still came out of somebody’s valuable time or out of their wallet. It is great that it exists and that this happens, but you are still benefitting from a lot of people’s generosity and the quality of product and support will vary over time. If you really think Socialize should be free, you should start up an open source project to match or beat it. If you succeed, more power to you. One more thing, I love the line that so often gets repeated about how people are tired of this or that company getting fat off of the blind community. I seem to have missed all of the stories on TMZ with the paparazzi folling around all of the accessibility moguls and their over the top antics with thir vast fortunes. Seriously, if any of you people had even the simplest clue of how much it actually costs to develop and manufacture these products, you would be beyond shocked. The profit margins are not exactly stellar. If you really had any clue, you wouldn’t be surprised to find how few major figures in the accessibility product industry, even those at the greediest of companies are in that lofty one percent. You come up with a way to be the next member of the billionaires club in an industry with such a limited market and you will probably be lauded as a business genius. You have the same expenses as each and every other business in existence, you pay more for components an d other materials because you are buying them to sell products in the thousands not millions, and you have to pay your employees the same as any other employer commensurate with their skills and experience and yet you still need to make enough not just to break even, but to pay what it costs to keep products up to date and develop new ones. I am sure they are all living in McMansions and drinking champagne with every meal. Really they are. It would be great if they could do it for free, or even for a one time fee, but we live in this place called reality. It either costs, and keeps costing unless it is an absolutely static product or a support base of people much larger than anyone who really thinks that there are huge profit margins on these products, hardware and software both would believe both in donations of their valuable time, skills and money to create and support. I would love to witness some of the many, many people I have heard this line from ad nauseum over nearly 25 years try to start their own company and do it as well or better for less or to take on the responsibility for running their own open source project and give their time to creating something as good or better for free. NVDA is a great example of how to do it right, but I have serious doubts whether any of those who feel they can just pull arbitrary numbers out of somewhere and smugly state them as a fair and realistic price to sell a product for and still keep your doors open and do little things like continue eating, let alone allowing your employees to eat as well while supporting the product and developing the next generation of products have what it takes to run a business or even a free project on that scale. Regards, Chris mark t Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 2:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: GWSocialEyes Price Change Coming Soon sorry don't agree, a one off payment for the software of 25$ or 40$ should be fine for gwmicro i think we should make a stand on this one i fort gwmicro was to help the blind and not fill there pockets each year after my sma is finished i will be going over to nvda very disappointed mark. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
