BILLW@Sri-Kl.ARPA (04/22/84)
Thank you Alex Pournelle!! I almost became rich and famous by writing an immensly popular communications package for the IBM PC. Alas, I didnt finish it in time (take a look and see how many competitors there are now!). Here is how it would have broken down: o End price to user: $200 This is what youy would have had to pay if you walked into computerland and bought a copy. This is about what good communications programs are selling for these days... (those days?) o price to computerland: $120 (40% markup to retail price) In exchange for their $80, Computerland provides a place where people can look at and try out the program, first order customer assistance, and (mostly) salesmanship. o Price to 'distributer': $80 (another 40% down the drain) the distributer runs around getting places like computerland, the byte shop, and so on to carry the product. Perhaps he also does advertising, and/or shows your product at trade shows. Maybe he sells some copies through mnail order (now you know why mail order software is cheaper). The distributer gets the disks from: o Publisher. The publisher does a lot of work. Making the disks; The disk labels; The documentation. Putting the documentation in those swell binders; Shrink wrapping the whole mess. Copy protection, if hes into that. Advertising. Support. Suggestions for "version 2". etc. o What do I, the programmer, get? Why, 20% royalties of course (and thats a pretty good royalty. It'd be a lot less for a game or other really 'mass market' type software). Thats 20% of what the publisher gets. $16 for each copy of the program sold. $0 for each copy of the program pirated. If everyone with an IBM PC bought MY software, I could be quite rich. o So what do \I/ do with the money? Well, I pay a lawer $500 or so for having found me a publisher. I pay him $60/hour for any other problems that might creep up. I go out and BUY a compiler for my computer, so I can write more software. Maybe I upgrade my hardware. (in this particular instance, I had in mind buying the computer, since the software was written on borrowed hardware. Sigh.) And there's always "Version N+1". [maybe I finance a venture that doesnt work, like this one. I spend hours and hours writing a program that no-one ever sees, and is obsolete before it is done. I spend the $500 on the lawyer, and no one is interested. I chalk it up as being cheaper than a course at Stanford that would teach me an equivilent amount, pick up the pieces and go home.] ------------------------------- Places like JRT and Borland of course keep their prices down by cutting out most of the middle men. Maybe this works. You have to be selling a product whose audience is big enough that you get reasonable economies of scale doing disk duplications. Your audience has to be small enough that you dont need the kind of distributer network descibed above. The program has to be bug-free enough, and addressed to a suffiecntly intelligent audience that you dont need a large support network. JRT went out of business. Borland seems to be doing much better, and I wish them all the luck in the world. I even plan to buy a copy of Turbo Pascal 'real soon now'. I amazes me that the original programmer makes anything off of a game that sells for $40. Of course, you have a point. Games are basically worthless, certainly not worth $40! Thus I dont own any computer game programs. Pirated or otherwise. [Well, I did take advantage of Vectrex going out of business. But im sure Ill have my vectrex running unix (well, OS9) in no time :-)] Gosh I feel better now! Bill Westfield (BillW@SRI-KL.ARPA)