Re: Theory about upgrade drop offs

Dean,

clients might want .NET -- then you were likely an Enterprise Delphi
shop anyway. The cost is pretty minor is a .NET product is going to
make you several hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

I work for a very large company. The pain I have to go through to get
any component or product purchased is scary. This is despite the costs
involved if one of my developers had to write the equivilent code.
Products that come in under a certain floor limit are much easier to
get through so price does have an impact.

I work for a fairly large company. In my department...
- Six employees, averaging $60,000 per year including benefits.
- 15+ computers, plus IT time, backups, OSs, general purpose
software, mirrored development machines, SQL/Oracle servers,
etc. QA alone has its own network.
- MSDN subscriptions, project/development/QA software, etc.
- Office space, power, heating, phones, e-mail, etc.

My department runs well over a half-million plus a year.

Honestly, if sales wants us to develop a .NET product -- or something
we need D2006 for -- there is almost no business arguement where
a $5,000 upgrade (three or four developers) is even a factor worth
considering. Even if the project takes only half our department for
three months... it just cost $75,000 or so. Add the same for support and
maybe three to five times this to market/sell the product. Thus,
presumably management has already determined that the product is
going to make several hundreds of thousand of dollars.

Even with Delphi (Architech) being our most expensive piece of
(single) software... it is still barely a blip on the radar screen. We
upgrade
automatically, just for the insurance value of having the latest
version. We purchase source code for components for the same
reason, even though we are forbidden to actually altering it.

Yes, upgrading is a pain, but not a financial one. Any project requiring
one to upgrade... must be worth at least several hundreds of thousands
or millions of dollars at the Enterprise level ... otherwise it could not
justify the salaries, office space, support systems, marketting, etc. for
any product.

Products that come in under a certain floor limit are much easier to
get through so price does have an impact.

Just show them their own sales projections for the new product. If it
can not justify purchase an upgrade to Delphi... it certainly can not
justify two weeks of one person's time to develop.


Cheers,

Brett


.

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