> Unfortunatly, software economics are not that easy. I'll bet the gang at > IntelliJ has given this a lot of thought. I for one think that $399 is > very reasonable for a corporate setting, and I'm in the midst of making > that case to the company now.
I agree with that � for a corporate setting. It's just us miserable outcasts who can't join in! :-) > There are two problems with your argument, IMO. > a) Your scale is way off. Games that sell for $50 have potentailly > millions of sales, at least a couple of orders of magnitiude difference. > On the other side of the coin look at software that big development > shops use that has much less thought going into it, but also very few > customers often sell in the $10,000 range. Its all based on the size of > the potnetial market. The market for really good well thought out > programmer's programmers tools is unforunatly pretty damn small. Mostly, > its just pearls before swine. Yes, agreed. But with an open API for extending the system and a low entry cost, perhaps IDEA could become the closest thing to a "de facto" Java IDE. An open API would allow people to "dirty it up" with their newbie wizards and UI editors etc. that "shouldn't" come in the core IDE. > > Isn't it a case of 100,000 users @ $50 rather than $1,000 @ $200 ? > b) I really doubt it, but the real problem is getting there. You have to > have a sustainable business model, even these days, and unless big money > is willing to support you for 2-3 years to get to that level of market > saturation, you'll be long out of business before your ultra-cheap > pricing strucuture catches on. Yes. It depends on how IntelliJ works of course. If its a company with investment this shouldn't be so bad, but if its a bunch of talented guys doing it in their semi-spare time, then the immediate income isn't such a deal ;-) > To us, its worth the price. But I do think that having a $200 personal > version is a really great idea; as you point out, most non-business > users are not going to easily drop $400 bucks on anything. I'd consider > buying IntelliJ out of my own pocket for that much, its that great a > tool. Yes, and I almost certainly will at the discounted rate. The problem is this $200 license � it says you can't register it to a company, but does that mean the billing cannot go to a company? That would suck, as a small company as a trading entity for an individual should be able to register this as a business cost. Without the bill in the name of the company (and payment) this is no good. At the normal rates, IDEA is more expensive than Windows XP Pro! I realise the markets are vastly different here, but so are the R+D costs. > We're programmers, dammit, why is it so hard to pay for something that > we know people put a lot of effort into? I'm all for open-source and > everything, but in some cases I think its led people to put little value > on anything. Maybe that's good from an ultimate social utopia point of > view, but in the meantime I'd like to keep the folks at IntelliJ happy > and fed. :-) Me too! > Anyway, I can't find a key anywhere on the site for the current EAP > program key. Does anyone know where it is? I'm still waiting for > corporate approval to buy and am seriously jonesing... Haha. No EAP for another month or so. Jones away. How about some other innovations: 1) Point scoring system � a way to get discounted / free IDEA by evangelising publicly (no not in towns or cities!) or perhaps a sell-thru system for websites. 2) Advert swapping. I'll give IDEA some free ads on my websites for discount/freebies - How many hits would I need to get per month to get a free copy? :-) 3) Bulk-purchasing � couldn't we get 50 developers or so together and get a discounted rate? Come on give us EAP guinea pigs a break :-) 4) Can I part exchange it for my Jbuilder 4? Ha ha. How abut JB4 + C++Builder 3 and an original copy of MS Office 97 thrown in for free? ;-) Cheers _______________________________________________ Eap-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellij.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-list
