Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: AMIGA Message-ID: <1991Jan16.053729.14144@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 16 Jan 91 05:37:29 GMT References: <1991Jan15.024807.25384@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Jan15.201647.16637@rice.edu> Distribution: usa Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 40 jsd@elf.rice.edu (Shawn Joel Dube) writes: > I think that once Amiga gets rid of its game-machine image it will > really sell. Probably the thing that would best help it would be high > quality traditional productivity software (word-p, spreadsheet, etc.) > bundled free with the machine. Nope. The universal experience has been that this is a horrid idea. First, it isn't "free"; the costs of development and maintenance have to be paid, so it increases the price of the bundle. If the software is also "high quality", it increases the price a _lot_; quality costs. This higher cost hurts your sales compared to unbundled competitive machines. Second, a version of Gresham's law takes place; like silver drove out gold, bundled software drives out developers, so the _really high quality_ software never gets developed, and you end up _degrading_ the software available for your machine. Bundled software can be the kiss of death for your machine's market respectability. You just can't get people to buy something they think they've already gotten for "free", but you sure do get to listen to them complain about the lack of adequate tools until the cows come home. Consider the effect of the several editors bundled with the Amiga on the sales of the much superior Cygnus Ed (or the creation of any other commercial superior programmers' editor), for example. It's taken a _long_ time to build up an installed base such that there is a sufficient number of users willing to ignore the "free" editor software that comes with the Amiga and _pay_ for something really good, to make the risk of developing this product seem acceptable. Now, with the ice broken, a competitor is champing at the bit to enter from the wings. Today's premier example is the Mac, which severely depressed its software market until Apple smartened up and unbundled the productivity software, at which point the really superior word processors and such for which the Mac is justly famous sprang out of the woodwork in droves. Kent, the man from xanth.