Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 02:05:32 -0800 From: "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> To: "Phil Regnauld" <regnauld@ftf.net>, "David Scheidt" <dscheidt@enteract.com> Cc: <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Marketing vs. technical superiority (was: Judge: "Gates Was Main Culprit") Message-ID: <000401bf3275$9dcc7d50$021d85d1@youwant.to> In-Reply-To: <19991119102553.57394@ns.int.ftf.net>
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> David Scheidt writes: > > > > Most of them manage to do it in a more sane fashion, though. > .DLLs suck. > > The official way is to install the app. > > Lots of unofficial changes are made through hotfixes, SPs, etc... > > Like the MS 95 Plus Pack which also fixed a lot of problems > and missing > features. That's a blatant example of "pay for fixes". Sure. Many, many software companies do that when they can get away with it. In general, people seldom purchase an upgrade just to get bug fixes. And, in fact, a newer version of a product is generally not likely to be any more stable than previous versions -- new features often mean new bugs. In any event, nobody in the software industry likes to promote their products that way. ;) Many software companies only provide free fixes for 'security' bugs. I try to deal with companies that have open, fair, and honest bugfix policies whenever possible. Microsoft has been much better in the NT market than the 95/98 market. Although in the last 2 years, they've been a lot better. Time will tell. Perhaps part of the reason Microsoft offered the NT service packs for free was that they did contain so many bug fixes. Perhaps it was too expensive to maintain two 'streams', one with just bug fixes and one with new features. Although now it seems they're committed to doing just that, with 'service' packs and 'option' packs. One suspects the option packs will not be free. But perhaps Microsoft hopes that keeping prices low will help them gain market share in the server OS market. In any event, this is a peripheral point. In general, I think Microsoft charges as much as it possibly can for its products considering its long term view. It knows that low prices hurt profits but that high prices give people incentives to look elsewhere for solutions. Once the costs of development have been paid for, prices can easily be kept low, ensuring that there isn't enough profit oppurtunity left to finance someone else's development from the ground up. What's actually puzzling is why software prices in markets dominated by one company are as low as they are. One theory is that it's too easy for a competitor to scale up very quickly and steal domination. As soon as the price rises enough, a new company could develop a competing product and sell massive numbers of copies in very short order. Keeping software prices low maximizes the amount of time market domination can be maintained. One ironic point is that Microsoft must continuously innovate to keep its position as market leader (in terms of sales). Since software does not 'decay' or need replacement, Microsoft can only sell me a word processor once. Then I have it and could keep using it forever. They have to sell me a new word processor to maintain sales, and to do that, they'll have to convince me not to keep using my old one. That will take some sort of innovation. The staple innovation has been new or combined features. And, of course, if the market leader falls too far behind what is possible, price will become irrelevant. People want products that do what they need to get done. Sometimes even entire markets become irrelevant and it no longer matters who was the former market leader. (For example, there isn't much of a word processor market anymore. Office suites have obsoleted the entire market. There isn't much of a 16-bit spreadsheet market either.) DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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