Judy Perry 28/8/01 11:50 pm [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Heather Williams wrote:
>
>> We hear you. However, the pricing structure is actually an improvement on
>> the original pricing, which only gave you the options of the (free)
>> Starter kit, or the Pro license at $995. I don't think $349 assumes that
>> the buyer must be a corporation, it's a price that many shareware authors
>> for example could easily justify in time and effort saved to make a
>> product that sells.
>
>--It's certainly true that $350 is considerably better than $1K, but for
>some even the new, improved and drastically price-reduced product is still
>out of reach. For example, even if it flies high in academia, few K-12
>students are likely going to be able to convince their parents to shell
>out $350 for something they may 'outgrow' in a year's time.
Don't forget that K12 pricing is drastically reduced. A school can buy a
10 user K12 pack for $250 - that's actually $25 per user!
> The SOHO
>person might well also be wondering if the price can be justified.
Forgive my ignorance here, but what does SOHO mean?
>And, finally, the 'hobbyist' (FWIW, I really hate that term because it
>seems so snotty) can't do it at all.
I do agree the term "hobbyist" is not ideal, but it's hard to find a term
to use that isn't annoyingly patronising. "Beginning programmer"?
"Part-time User"?
>
>This is where competing products (dead and alive) really shine. When it
>was claimed (I'm forgetting where now) that something like many hundreds
>of thousands (I'm also forgetting the #s) of people used HC making it one
>of the most widely-used languages on the planet, probably most of them
>never would have had they had to pay $350 plus a hefty annual update
>subscription to do so.
Yes, but look at what happened to Hypercard... We *don't* want to be a
dead product. We can't live on air and program on Quadras... If even
Apple couldn't justify continuing to update Hypercard at the price it was
selling at, what hope would we have?
>
>The current pricing structure, which I again must emphasize is vastly
>improved, is still likely to serve as a barrier for the product becoming
>anything like 'mainstream'.
Well, I hope not. Time will tell. But Director is *much* more expensive
when you consider you have to buy two licenses to run on both major
platforms (and doesn't do Unix/Linux) and that's certainly a mainstream
product...
Regards,
Heather
>
>Regards,
>
>Judy Perry
Heather Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.runrev.com/>
Runtime Revolution Ltd, formerly Cross Worlds Computing,
Tel: +44 (0)131 7184333. Fax: +44 (0)1639 830 707.
Please quote all previous correspondance when replying to email.
