See, That's the point. There is no good reason to charge Major $'s for support that they don't provide.
Let's say that a vendor has some software that they sell for $5K per year They have a client base of 100 clients (100x $5K = $500K) They have 2 people doing support of the product at $100K per year so they have a net profit of $300K on the software, that should cover (eventually if not immediately) the development and marketing costs. To me, this appears to be a reasonable product support scenerio that treats customers fairly. Now what if that same company were to up the yearly cost of the software to $15K without changing the number of support/development personnel, now they have $1.5M comming in from the same product with only $200K in expenses to support it. Granted, there are a lot of other things that have to be paid for besides support and development, but not $1.1M worth. On the other hand, they shouldn't go out and put 10 more people on the support staff to deal with only 100 customers (at least I hope they wouldn't have to:)), but if they are going to charge that amount of money, they should be showing some tangable return for the client for it. Unfortunately, instead of looking at the product to decide what is "fair" or "reasonable" to charge, many of the vendors just try to get what they can. If the customer base falls, many will raise the price to keep profits stable. I realize that this doesn't really apply to all vendors, but it does to a lot of them. The point I was trying to get accross was that a really good product doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. I think that the pricing scheme that McKinney systems uses (or at least used to), is the way it should be done. Don't try to make a killing on any one product or any one customer, just try to have good software available at a reasonable price. There are a lot of vendor products that are very complex and the development costs can be fairly high, but I don't see that the price of the product warrants getting the development costs back the first year. If you are going to pay an arm and a leg for a product, you should be able to expect a lot back for your money. My point is, that in a lot of cases (but not all), I believe that the client is not receiving enough return back for the costs that are paid. Again, this is just my own feelings on the matter based on my own experiences at close to 500 client (and vendor) sites and may not represent your own reality, but it probably is very close. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
