General pricing thoughts (does not represent AQA...)

From: AutomatedQA - Robert Leahey (robertl_at_automatedqa.com)
Date: 07/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 15:29:57 -0500

Hi Paul,

> I don't doubt for a full time Delphi developer, your product is worth
> the price. But for me, it is out of my price range.

That's probably a better way to phrase that than your original statement.
;-)

> Well, if SleuthQA was still available, it would probably be less than
> AQTime 4. Of course since it is not, it is a moot point.

(Paul, the following rant is not aimed at you)
I think you've hit upon the crux of the issue in your own statement.
Let me make it clear that I'm speaking, for a moment, not as an employee of
AQA, but rather as a long-time Delphi developer. Having been involved now
with 3 different 3rd party Delphi tool vendors (each of which I seriously
feel to produce the best products in their niches) I strongly feel that the
general pricing level of most the Delphi tools market has been kept
comparatively and unrealistically low for most of the life of Delphi. I
assume that the phenomenon predates Delphi back into the TurboPascal days,
but don't really know.
What I do know is that when I compare the Delphi-specific products with
which I have been involved with their more "mainstream" Microsoft-specific
analogous tools, the Delphi tools are usually an order of magnitude less
expensive (even for the tools which are considered expensive in Delphi
circles). Contrawise, when these tools are compared to their other
Delphi-specific competitors, what I generally see is that if the price of
the competition is significantly less, it's the result of the competition
either being essentially a 1-2 person shop or a larger company that
eventually can't support it's own infrastructure under that pricing system
and has to significantly restructure (i.e., go out of business, lower
quality, lower output, get purchased, etc.)
In the end, Delphi becomes (in more than one way) the bane of its own
existence: by making developers SO productive and quick production SO easy,
decent 3rd party tools can be created for very little investment and then
sold for US$49, or so. Unfortunately (and I admit that this is a massive
generalization which I will not attempt to defend on a case-by-case basis)
the resulting tools are usually merely adequate - which for many programmers
is enough (some developers like feeling more hacker-like by using
cobbled-together tools that look like they were written in Notepad).
However, tool companies that attempt to put out a full-fledged,
well-designed, well-produced, supported, maintainable, often updated,
productive tool that supports Delphi while allowing the company to dare to
make a profit are trapped into having their products labeled as costing a
fortune in the Delphi market while costing sometimes thousands of dollars
less than their MS-oriented competitors.

It could perhaps be argued that this can then lead to statements like:
> Well, if SleuthQA was still available, it would probably be less than
> AQTime 4.

Once again, I state that I was not wearing my AutomatedQA hat for this
little rant. (And Paul, this was of course not aimed at you). 

-- 
Robert Leahey
AutomatedQA
"Paul Dolen" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:5i08f0lqhj9vfu0pi26oobvkmeggq6p1nf@4ax.com...
> Well, if SleuthQA was still available, it would probably be less than
> AQTime 4.  Of course since it is not, it is a moot point.
>
> I don't doubt for a full time Delphi developer, your product is worth
> the price.  But for me, it is out of my price range.
>
> On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 14:03:53 -0500, "AutomatedQA - Robert Leahey"
> <robertl@automatedqa.com> wrote:
>
> >If you feel that our prices are substantially out of line, let's compare
> >features with a tool that you feel is more appropriately priced.
>

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