Let me make a few clarifications/comments:
1. The $99 educational license has been available w/3.5
2. I know simultaneous users != total users, but in the case of intranet
applications, where users come in at 9AM and leave at 5PM and use the app
in between, simultaneous users usually DOES equal total users.
3. Our UI has a frameset w/ 3 frames, which is reasonable. But in anycase,
if I want to make a 10 frames or 20 frames, why should that concern Apple
and how much I pay them? Any pricing model that dictates how you should
design your front end is ridiculous!!
4. When we became a WO development shop, we were given the 3.5 pricing,
which no matter how you look at it is very different that the new pricing.
It is unfair to change the pricing model like that.
5. Your cost justification figures assume an internet application, and are
therefore useless to me. Ours is an intranet app where high bandwidth is
dirt cheap.
6. Even if we are to assume just one transaction per user request, we are
still left with a lousy price model. In an intranet app, if a user on
averation makes 4 requests per minute (a very reasonable amount) that
translates to 25 users max at the $7500 level. This is half the users
allowed under the old pricing. And forget about the $18000 200 user level.
It's gone. They have to cough up an additionall $7000.
*** Once again I URGE all developers who find this pricing model unfair to
bring these issues up with their Apple account rep.
-Afshin Behnia
-----Original Message-----
From: Pierce T. Wetter III [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 8:27 AM
To: Afshin Behnia
Cc: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Re: Unfair WO4 pricing
At 5:22 PM -0800 3/8/99, Afshin Behnia wrote:
> As you may know, WO4 is priced very differently than 3.51
>
> The 3.51 deployment licensing was (per server machine):
> $7,499 for up to 50 named users, unlimited CPUs
> $17,499 for up to 200 named users, unlimited CPUs
> $24,999 for unlimited users, one CPU
> $49,999 for unlimited users, unlimited CPUs
>
> The new 4.0 licensing is no longer based on named users, but
> transaction/minuted (tpm) instead. The deployment licenses are:
> $7,499 for up to 100 tpm, one CPU
> $24,999 for unlimited tpm, one CPU
> $49,999 for unlimited tpm, unlimited CPUs
>
> The problem with this new licensing is that at the $7499 level, 100 tpm
is
> useless! Our application hits over 25 tpm with ONE user using the app
> normally, so 100 tpm should be only good enough for 4 concurrent users
max,
> versus the 50 users under the old licensing. What Apple has done,
> effectively, is that it has eliminated the $7499 and $17499 levels and is
> making smaller clients purchase the $24,999 instead.
Ok, here I leap into the fray.
I think y'all are all wet. I see two assumptions in your logic:
1. Simultaneous users does not equal total users.
2. 10 transactions per page.
3. Apple won't negotiate.
#1 isn't true in practice. Best case, say you serve users 1 page/day
between
9 and 5. Thats 28,800 users.
#2 is only true in your implementation. Generally, its one transaction
per page.
#3 Isn't true. If you talk to your Apple rep and say, hey, look, because
of
my implementation, I'm hitting this early, they might be able to make
you a deal.
Summary:
I find the new licensing scheme a vast improvement over the old scheme.
In detail:
The 3.51 licensing was:
$24,999 for an internet project. (unlimited users, after all)
That was death when I was bidding WO projects, because I might only
be getting a few users a day, yet because it was an internet project,
that was unlimited users. Now the 4.0 licensing is:
$99 for unlimited tpm (educational institutions only)
$1000 for 25tpm, but you have to run MOSXS. ( $5000 with hardware.)
$7500 for 100tpm
$25K for unlimited, one CPU
$50K for a whole site (lost in the noise of the hardware,database,etc)
Transactions per minute is transactions from the WO App, which means:
One frame, one page, or one image (but only if it goes through WO)
The only way to get 10 transactions per page is to have WO select
which image you're viewing, and have 9 extra images per page, or have
a frameset with 9 sub frames, also served through WO.
If you're doing this, you're silly, or you have a special
requirement (you're implementing an image database?)
So for most people, tpm is really pages/per/minute.
Let's set our average page size to be 5K and our average browse
time is 15 seconds per page. So if we do the math, for 100 pages per
minute, that's 25 simultaneous users, pulling 500K/second across the
network. 500K/second is 4 T1s, or $4000/month of bandwith.
How much did we pay for this? $7,500. Pretty cheap. Your network
costs will be more then that for an internet project.
So I find the new licensing to be a VAST improvement. Basically,
for internet projects, WO costs scale with your other ramp-up costs
(better servers, database, etc.) but they cap at $50K. Cool. Such a
deal.
Pierce
P.S.
Ways to fix your implementation:
First off, the easiest way to speed up your web serving is to serve
images from a seperate server with enough RAM to keep them all
cached. (images.yahoo.com is a good example). Even if you don't put
your images on a seperate server, WO shouldn't need to touch them,
they should be handled (and cached) by the web server.
Second, setup your framesets so that they don't have to talk to WO
for the static portions.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Pierce T. Wetter III, Director, Twin Forces, Inc.
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone:520-779-4227
<http://www.twinforces.com/>
U.S. Mail: 1300 South Milton Rd, Suite 206, Flagstaff, AZ 86001
