Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!eagle!icdoc!dcw From: dcw@doc.ic.ac.uk (Duncan C White) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Software pricing (was Re: WHAT ATARI NEEDS TO DO...) Message-ID: <267@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk> Date: 25 Apr 88 16:21:18 GMT References: <209@bdt.UUCP> <115@avsd.UUCP> <10400@sunybcs.UUCP> Reply-To: dcw@gould.UUCP (Duncan C White) Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK. Lines: 101 In article <10400@sunybcs.UUCP> leo@sunybcs.UUCP (Leo Wilson) writes: >In article <115@avsd.UUCP> govett@avsd.UUCP (David Govett) writes: >>Rumor has it that WordPerfect Corp. is so disgusted with ST users >>pirating ST WordPerfect that it is considering withdrawing it from the >>market. As I said, it's only a rumor. If true, however, it seems >>to support my thesis that software should be priced for the intended >>audience, and I know no ST users who would buy it for $300. > [stuff about Suggested Retail Price deleted] > >Personally, I don't see that the cost of software should reflect anything >more than the market will bear. If the use you get out of Word Perfect or >for that matter any other software, isn't worth the price you pay for it, >DON'T BUY IT. Don't steal it, either. You made the choice by not buying it. > But how do you know how much use you will [in the future] make of a product which you have to buy/not buy NOW ? Being able to "test-drive" a piece of software, in the comfort of your own home, would certainly be attractive to me: mind you, perhaps it would be a cut down version - so that piracy wouldn't be a problem... >What has purchase price got to do with anything at all? "Geez, if I buy >this software I can save 19 man-hours per week (at $9.00/hr) for the next >two and a half years, but I'll pass because the initial cost is $200." >Makes LOTS of sense to me to pass it by... You appear to be talking, here, about BUSINESS USE of ST's. What about PERSONAL use - games playing, programming, music etc? I don't put a price on the time I spend on my HOBBY COMPUTER... so if I see a $200 package [for the sake of argument] I would want to be REALLY SURE that I was going to use it a lot. In fact, I probably wouldn't buy it - on cost grounds alone! - if it cost much more than 100 pounds. The original poster [David Govett] wrote, in the paragraph before the one Leo quotes: >If I may be allowed to generalize, people who buy STs are, on the >whole, quite different from those who buy PCs and clones. Many PCs >go into businesses where money exists to buy expensive software, but >ST users seem to have trouble buying even moderately priced software. If I may be allowed to meta-generalize :-) I think this is right: many ST users [at least in the UK] are upgrading to 520STFM's from earlier home micros, such as the BBC Micro and the Spectrum. Typically, then, they [or their parents!] just manage to fork out the 300 quid for the basic computer, and then are faced with high software prices [such as the typical game being 20 quid and Fast Basic being 70 quid or so - because most of them have used BBC BASIC and want a lookalike] Not surprisingly, many of them pirate various software - games, Fast Basic, assemblers, drawing tools etc. Other buyers [like most of those on Usenet/BITNET/FIDO/whatever else] may use Unix or similar big systems at work, and were interested much more in "1MB RAM, 68000, bit mapped graphics, CHEAP" than "look at all the flashy games" These people probably make some serious use of the machine - it is these who yell about the quality of the documentation. It is these sort of people who tend to prefer command-line-interpreters, hate GEM, and are interested in multi-tasking O/S for the ST... [Of course, the above is a simplification... what isn't!] In the above context, I think that the market for something like WordPerfect - an expensive professional word processor for business use - would be extremely small in the UK. Products like First Word Plus and u-emacs/Proff/TeX are much more likely to be used by the typical user community - the first by those who like GEM and the second by those multi-tasking lovers. Now, ok, the ST may be a good cheap small business machine - and Atari certainly seem to be targetting the desktop publishing market - but with the advent of cheap PC clones [Amstrad PC1512 at 400 pounds, for instance] the ST is going to have some stiff competition on price, to get into the business market. As many people have remarked, one of the ST's biggest problems [blocking its use in business] is being seen as a games machine. The situation may be different in the States, of course... I have little [or no] knowledge of the typical buyer there... >=== >Leo E. Wilson 364 West Delavan Avenue Buffalo, NY 14213 (716)883-7573 >(leo@gort.cs.Buffalo.EDU) ...!sunybcs[!leow]!leo leo@sunybcs.bitnet Duncan White. I woke up this morning, hit a few random keys, and lo and behold, this article appeared. Should I have stayed in bed? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Duncan White, | Flying is the art of aiming oneself Dept. Of Computing, | at the ground and missing. Imperial College, | -- Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks London SW7, England | for all the fish.