>>Successful and available for everyone are two very different things>>I
am more concerned with Adobe making enough money of LCDS Hi Jochem, I
agree 100%, it should not be given away. A lower price does make it
available to a larger market. For example, if a copy of LCDS were: -
$1,000 for every firm with less than 100 employees - and $5,000 for
every firm with 100 or morethe revenue potential would be nearly 11
times greater than if every firm having 500 or more employees purchased
a copy at the list price. That's how big the SMB market is in America.
This is from data provided by the US Census Bureau.
I learned quite a bit looking at this data. The census data showed over
5 million small business firms (up to 500 employees). There were only
17,000 firms with 500 or more employees.
If a firm had more than one location, it was counted again for each
state where they do business. I didn't run the numbers based on every
location needing a license because most firms have a data center
supporting multiple locations, and LCDS has been proven to support
thousands of connections.
This does not include sales to any of the 20 million sole proprietors in
the report. These are firms which are composed of all owners/partners
and no employees like many LLC's (law firms, accountants, etc). I
suppose there are some doctors in that category, too which could be
prospects for office management software which needs data services.
There is probably other ways to look at this, or something I've
overlooked. The premise is that the SMB market is huge. For the last
3+ years, it had appeared like someone at Adobe had this figured out,
while the more affordable options were available. Personally I thought
it was explicit endorsement of interest in the SMB marketplace, which is
why we got on board.
I wonder how many CF users will have this same rude awakening when they
go to upgrade to 9?
