> I would upgrade if they would simply offer us laggers a reasonable fixed > upgrade price. The more upgrades that occur, the more expensive it is, and > less likely it is that I will upgrade. The next version will likely be > better, and add additional modules I don't need, and the increased price to > upgrade will probably scare me away again. I can't imagine I'm the only one > in this situation.
Their theory is that Altium needs to make a guaranteed revenue amount from laggard upgraders, nearly on par with the revenue from enthusiast upgraders. That's why each new version has a more onerous upgrade price. If they didn't do that, users could more easily justify skipping a version or two and it would save the user money at the expense of reducing Altium's revenues. In other words, it's a way to prevent the laggard mentality from cannibalizing the enthusiast mentality. Unfortunately, it does mean that Altium will lose some customers over the long haul. I guess they feel they have to set a lower limit on the *effective* price of using Protel. For those of us buyers who cannot agree with the seller on a price, we will have to take our business elsewhere. > I don't need the FPGA support. I just need a decent program for schematic > capture and PCB design. That's it. Protel used to be the perfect program > for that. Protel is complete overkill for that now. I don't see that > Protel wants me as a customer, so I don't think it is unreasonable to ask > members of this forum if there is anything out there that may fit my minimal > needs a bit more economically. Any recommendations? That is the problem with so many categories of software. Within the past decade, so much software has become "gentrified", that is, priced out of the original market. It's a plague that swept the world starting in the dot-com era, and long after the dot-com crash the effects of product gentrification still remain. The software space is now inhabited by Free/Open Source Software, very expensive closed-source software, and not much in between. Even Windows, the most common OS, has been gentrified. $300 for a retail boxed copy of XPpro, $200 for XPhome. The problem with not having much in between those 2 extremes is that the free/open stuff is frequently not easily usable in it's supplied form, and the proprietary stuff is too expensive and locks user's data into proprietary formats (vendor lock-in). It's truly a sad state of affairs. Best regards, Ivan Baggett Bagotronix Inc. website: www.bagotronix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Lowy Sybrandy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Protel EDA Discussion List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 1:47 PM Subject: [PEDA] Difficult to justify upgrading. Any decent alternatives? > I would upgrade if they would simply offer us laggers a reasonable fixed > upgrade price. The more upgrades that occur, the more expensive it is, and > less likely it is that I will upgrade. The next version will likely be > better, and add additional modules I don't need, and the increased price to > upgrade will probably scare me away again. I can't imagine I'm the only one > in this situation. > > I don't need the FPGA support. I just need a decent program for schematic > capture and PCB design. That's it. Protel used to be the perfect program > for that. Protel is complete overkill for that now. I don't see that > Protel wants me as a customer, so I don't think it is unreasonable to ask > members of this forum if there is anything out there that may fit my minimal > needs a bit more economically. Any recommendations? > > > > ____________________________________________________________ > You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum > > To Post messages: > mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Unsubscribe and Other Options: > http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com > > Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] > > Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] > ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
