Re: A marketing question

Danijel

Please re-check our prices:
http://www.realthinclient.com/order_rt.htm


Ah, OK ...I missed the bit about 'bundles'. So, it is 799 euro rather than 1000 euro for the complete source, correct?

I agree that support will in most cases not be necessary, but since RTC Portal VCL is a set of components (new update about to be released next week), even if you did make a lot of changes and created your own brand, you could still profit from changes, fixes and other additions to the components, the same way you can profit from updates to any other set of Delphi components from third-party vendors.


I agree in theory, but in practice it is a big job going through an update with a diff tool and doing a line by line assessment of whether changes/fixes are going to break stuff that we have injected into the codebase. We integrate new DevEx releases only once or twice a year for exactly this reason ...otherwise we just fix the bugs that we care about ourselves.

PS. There is a huge difference between the old Remote Tools code and the new RTC Portal VCL, which was basically written from scratch.


I'm sure there is, but in the end I have to assess whether those differences confer 799 euros (if I am reading correctly this time) of material advantage in respect of our requirements. Upgrading a component set like yours is not merely a question of adapting a bit of source code - all your DFMs need to be stripped down and components replaced with (our) standard equivalents (DevEx) and so forth[1]. The cost of that work has to be factored in as well.

Eryk

[1] Note to component vendors who supply UIs: it would be MUCH easier if you would define a unit of wrappers like TRTCButton, TRTCComboBox etc. that are just 'do nothing' encapsulations of the standard VCL components. That way 'TRTCButton = class (TButton)' could be changed to 'TRTCButton = class(TcxButton)' ...or TRzButton or TTMSButton or whatever the application 'standard' is in a centralised way. It wouldn't be completely seamless, but it would be an improvement over grep/replace through every .DFM and .PAS file.
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