agm@cs.brown.edu (Axel Merk) (09/20/90)
Could someone please explain me how people come up with these prices in the new product catalogue (fall 1990) -- am I missing that these programmers are geniuses or is NeXT-software-pricing based on the Nikkei index? $40,000 plus run-time license:PaperSight Developer's Toolkit (objects for the interface builder) -- their other products are overpriced, too. $25,000 NeuExpert (expert systems and neural networks) $12,000 Flexible License Manager $995 Displaytalk (the extension to YAP) $395 TranScriber 1.0 (wait a minute - you can even rewind your sound! How many hours did it take to write this? Oh yes, this is medical software) $2,500 MediaStation 1.2 (fine program, but was it so difficult to write? or is it that special?) $15,200 MundoCart/Optical (wow -- a zoomable world-map!!! the data set was developed years ago) $4595 XWave Version 1.0 (connects NeXTs to PCs using NFS and TCP/IP -- big deal) $10,000 starting price: Worldtalk/400 (makes NeXT-mail compatible with X400) $7,000 starting price: AFS 3.0 (I thought you could get this for free at CMU? Is the design of the interface that expensive?) I did not even mention many painfully high (i.e. workstation-oriented) prices (e.g. Objective DB Toolkit) that are good programs, but too high for my taste. On the other hand, some applications for <$100 were taken out of the catalogue. How can one attrack the masses with this kind of pricing? Why can't all applications be more like FrameMaker -- complex applications, with reasonable academic and acceptable commercial prices (for what they offer)? Axel ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Axel Merk "One needs a certain amount of blindness -- -- agm@cs.brown.edu to see perfection" - Christopher Nuzum -- -- phone/fax (401)272 2262 Brown University Box 53 Providence RI 02912 -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (John C. Haugeland) (10/18/90)
glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes: >Adobe Illustrator will sell at exactly the same retail price as on the >Macintosh. Lotus Improv is about $595 (from memory). WordPerfect is >$495. FrameMaker is $995. TouchType, our product, is $249. >LightHouse's Diagram! is $249. Stone Design's TextArt is $375. > >There is plenty of affordable software, and most of the software is >being priced at "PC" prices, not at workstation prices. There is >plenty of very expensive software on the Macintosh, too. I'm not convinced that this answers the charge that NeXT software will be more expensive than for other platforms. After all, nobody in his or her right mind would pay list for Adobe Illustrator, Lotus 123, or Word Perfect; mail order prices are 50% to 60% of "retail". But if NeXT software is not carried by such competitive vendors, we may actually have to pay list price--in effect, almost double the real prices for other machines. Does anybody know anything about this, or have any ideas? John Haugeland haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu