Re: LW "hobbyist pricing"

verec wrote: 
What I HAVE suggested, is a rescaling of the "features/prices"
scale in such a way that neither the bottom = $0 revenue,
nor the top = $1100 revenue would be affected AT ALL.

Ah, one begins to see the roots of your confusion! Their $1,100+275/year product is their entry level product. The $0 one is just to generate goodwill, build market awareness, and allow potential customers to self-qualify themselves before bothering the sales staff.

Your suggestion above presupposes that no future customers of the $1,100 product would instead choose one of your:

Hobbyist                  USD  300 (reads .ini file)
Web-deploy basic          USD  600 (doesn't quit after 5 hours)
Professional Web          USD  900 (does SQL + binary delivery)


That's unlikely.

I also understand that LW cannot afford to canibalise their
sales of the professional edition, but my guess is that leaving
out the application delivery from the hobbyist edition is what
would draw people who need it to the professional edition.

This is your most self-serving suggestion, because you freely admit that the two features *you* most want are:

1. actually read the .ini file
2. no artificial "Quit after 5 hours"

The goal you've set for yourself is to convince the vendor that you represent a group of people who would pay several hundred dollars for some stripped-down product (too bad you set off a race-to-the-bottom bidding war), but wouldn't dream of paying $1,100. This market would have to be both large (thousands of copies per year) and completely disjoint from the current and future market for Professional Edition. Also, it would help if you could convincingly argue that these new customers would be likely to pay for support (i.e. become an ongoing revenue stream, rather than the more likely group that doesn't pay for maintenance, complains in public about the cost and timing of upgrades etcetera). If nothing else, I admire the optimism about the growth of Lisp among hobbyists implied by your model. But it's still nuts.

> I never EVER suggested to LOWER the price of ANY current
> edition.

There's some rudiments of business which you don't seem to understand. You're proposing that they introduce a new product priced below any of their current products. That product would become their new entry level product, regardless of how you rearrange the labels. Now if that product sells a lot of copies, it changes the whole tenor of their business, because a large fraction, perhaps even a majority of their customers are the low margin type who start losing the company money on their first tech support call or email. When the ringing of the telephone is likely to signal a dead economic loss to the company, how do you think the company answers the phone? Conversely, if they DON'T sell a lot of copies of the new Cheapside Man Edition, intelligent business strategy says they should never introduce it in the first place, because it will inevitably draw the company's resources and focus away from its most valuable, most profitable customers.

Since we're hobyyist, we don't need CORBA or binary delivery (they
are indeed useful, but as a "hobbyist" I can live without), and
I'm not interested _at all_ in either SQL or Prolog.

That will come as a big relief to the vendor. You're not offering much money, but at least they'll be spared the cost of providing you with Prolog and CORBA! See the fallacy here? Other parts of your drivel indicate that you understand quite well that their development is a sunk cost, and you're probably even dimly aware that the standard software model is to offer a broad array of features to all customers, adding functionality to the base product and amortizing its cost over the maximum number of units. You're already being offered the advantage of that discount; the majority of the vendor's current customers probably don't use CORBA or Prolog, either. You don't get to carve yourself out a second round of discounts by switching to à la carte pricing and attempting to pay your share only of the sunk costs of the bits you actually use.

In fact, your whole series of clueless bleatings seem to be grounded on the unspoken assumption that as sales rise to infinity, the per-unit development costs fall to zero, so you ignore the constant terms and concentrate on the linear terms. To put it more crudely, you seem to be saying "I couldn't give a rat's ass about your fixed costs. Find some way to sell me what I want at a little more than the marginal cost of production, and if you can't sell enough units or find some other sucker to pay my share of the fixed costs, that's YOUR problem, Mister vendor."

Well, I'm here to tell you that the vendor's fixed costs are YOUR problem. Sales won't go to infinity, fixed costs won't go to zero, and potential customers who don't offer to pay their share will go to bed hungry.

If you really are so poor that you feel nobody is entitled to profit from your custom, or you have some psychological damage compelling you to seek out deals on which your counterparties lose money, I've two suggestions for you from the weird weird world of economics: You can buy a small General Motors car in the US, where they are priced below cost to remain onside of government Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations (GM makes their, ahem, "profits" on their larger vehicles), or you can sign up for Iridium satellite phone service. Their fixed costs per customer were too high, so their assets were bought out of bankruptcy (likely at about 15 cents on the dollar, though I can't find exact figures) and customers continue enjoy the benefit.

See you in the funny papers, Cheapside Man.
.

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