mark@mips.COM (Mark G. Johnson) (11/17/89)
What is the largest value ever seen for the ratio
Cost of software package S for computer C
------------------------------------------------------- ??
Hardware cost of appropriately configured machine C
There are some software vendors who "reason" as follows:
Gee, I sell it for $X on the IBM PC, and this other
computer C is (n) times faster than the PC, so I'll price
the software at $(n*X) for computer C.
The numbers get _really_ astounding when the SW vendor normalizes
his pricing to a VAX; then for example a copy for the NeXT (whose
HW is substantially cheaper and substantially faster than a VAX)
would cost 3x as much as a VAX copy.
I myself have seen price quotes "Software S to run on computer C"
where the software costs 8 times as much as the hardware. Is this
a record?
--
-- Mark Johnson
MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086
(408) 991-0208 mark@mips.com {or ...!decwrl!mips!mark}desnoyer@apple.com (Peter Desnoyers) (11/18/89)
In article <31599@hal.mips.COM> mark@mips.COM (Mark G. Johnson) writes: > I myself have seen price quotes "Software S to run on computer C" > where the software costs 8 times as much as the hardware. Is this > a record? I'm sure not. I've seen packages for the PC that run $40k or more. (One was reviewed in Spectrum, I think, a few months ago.) If you run it on a cheap AT clone, you get a ratio of 30 or more. Look at it this way: There are certainly programs that are worth $40k to a company. Some of these would hold most of their value even if they were running on a PC - i.e. they are not hugely compute- or io-intensive, but rather do something novel and valuable. If you are going to sell a $40k program widely, you can target it to a $3-5K system (for a system price of $43-$45K, of which you keep almost all) or you can target it to a $20K system, for a total of $60K. Unless there is a large installed base of the $20K machines (or the program is too slow on the $3K machines) you will make more money targetting the cheap system. Peter Desnoyers Apple ATG (408) 974-4469