glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) (06/25/91)
Mark R. Thomsen writes > The customer would pay more for > the floptical in the store, but then he has bought a disk he can recycle. > The idea is the producer passes on the differences in costs, which gets > reflected in price differentials. The free market will undoubtably do > the rest, lower and raise demands, etc. The software company should > remain impervious to the media fashion, modulo stock. Managing stock > with version changes is part of the real challenge for software companies. Well, the reality is that a customer never just "buys" a piece of software. The customer pays money to the software company for a product relationship. No, wait, that sounds too california. They pay for the initial product, which includes a manual and the media. But they also pay for the right to bug fixes, updates, and so on. In the case of the optical disk media, it is easy enough to factor the disk's cost into the initial purchase price, but if you plan to ship free upgrades to your customer base when you release a new version of the product, or if you want to ship a bug fix to some of your customers, you can't afford the media cost any more, and it is a hassle to charge the customer another $175 for the disk that you're shipping the update on. So you either penalize everybody a little bit by raising the initial purchase price, or you penalize the people who get upgrades and bug fixes by having to re-negotiate the media. We could fit our first product, TouchType, plus a 35-page on-line manual in both FrameMaker and PostScript form (in case you don't have FrameMaker) onto a single 1.44Kb floppy disk, thanks to the Installer. We used to ship it on an optical disk, leaving a very large amount of disk space untouched. Frankly, it was ridiculous. Luckily, by the time the free product upgrade came around, floppies existed, but we've still had to do the please-send-me-a-blank-disk polka quite a number of times. I still think floppy drives are required on every machine, regardless of what other media options you have. -- Glenn Reid NeXTMail: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us RightBrain Software ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn NeXT/PostScript developers 415-326-2974 (NeXTfax 326-2977)