Roy wood wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jeremy Taffel<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
<SNIP>
Getting back on topic...
I would be interested in the DVD, but, as I am limited to plain vanilla QDOS emulation (uQLx, QLAY), because, I can't justify the outlay for QPC2..... (I'm not saying that it's over-priced, but in a limited and shrinking market, no selling price can be a commercial proposition, so better surely to drop the price and get some new sales than leaving it at a price where it costs a comparable price to complete linux distro, complete with professional manuals, and 6 cds or so of applications, or an oem version of Windows)
The point is that QPC2 has represented a great deal of work on the part of Marcel who is still at university and has a low income. If you take it that the LINUX distribution and that Windows is more widespread then the payment you are making in respect of the work put into their construction is far higher. If you had a similar payment to make to Marcel for the time effort and dedication he has put into making QPC2 such a superb system you would be paying a lot more.
I don't disagree with any of that . I think you are just agreeing with me that QPC2 is not an economic proposition. Marcel's income from it is , I am sure, scant reward for all his long hours and unparalled skill. Please don't read any of what I said as criticism of Marcel, or the product, it isn't. It would also be totally unfair for me to use this list to try to apply pressure to get him to change the price. That is not the intent. He deserves to get as high an income as possible from sales of his product, and the product deserves to get the widest possible useage. However, it occurs to me that if there are many potential buyers like myself who have not bought it because of the price, then perhaps neither goal is being achieved at present. I can't be the only casual user who would be interested in seeing what the new high colour apps are like and perhaps pickiung up some old projects using Turbo, now that most of the old limitations have been removed, but can't justify the type of expenditure that would be involved in getting up to date. But how many more like me are there? Another posting on this list suggested that there can't be much of a market left to fill. If that's the case, current new sales must be very low, and I suspect that most recent sales have been upgrades from previous versions.
So, suppose, for the sake of argument, he were to half the price of buying it from new. There's a risk that he gets no more sales than he would have had anyway, and his income takes a hit. However, if he doubles his sales, then he breaks even, but the community is possibly re-invigorated by the renewed enthusiasm of those new purchasers. If he more than doubles the number of sales, then everyone wins.
So, which would be the most likely scenario? How many casual visitors do the various QL web sites get? how many have downloaded a QPC demo version and not gone out to buy the full thing? If they were interested enough to download the demo , why didn't they buy it? was it because of lack of functionality? (unlikely IMHO), or was it because of price? How many of those visitors would be tempted to get back into the QL if the purchase didn't leave a sizable hole in the wallet that needs to be explained to he/she who must be obeyed?
With the current pricing scheme on his website, upgrade to the latest version is relatively low cost. However, the only prices are for the latest version or for upgrade to it. One possibility that comes to mind would be to enable purchase in small chunks; eg initial purchase QPC1 for a small amount, with upgrade to QPC2v3 via v1,v2.
Thoughts? Flames?
Regards,
Jeremy
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