Software for $50K?

[Marc Clifton]

What I love about sites like this one is that you can stare at them for hours and not have a clue what it is that they actually do or why anyone would need their tools. It's all marketing phrases strung together like Christmas tree lights, each one twinkling "read me! I'm important! I help sell this product!" Belch. Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

The last time I looked (1998), a full development & runtime licence for TYX PAWS[^] (the ATLAS 716-89 test language system mandated for many support contracts by the US and UK military) cost £48,000 for a single user licence. :omg: Our management nearly had a fit when they saw the licencing costs, but they obviously had no choice. TYX know they have a monopoly, and price accordingly. Anna :rose: Riverblade Ltd - Software Consultancy Services Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.

[Henry miller]

A programer making $50k/year is very low level, at least in the US. Thats not counting overhead (you have to pay his boss, plus benifits, the accountant, lawyers, etc) So a single copy at $50k had better take a month or less to write, otherwise you lose money! How many copies will they sell. If you figure this took 2 programers 1 year to write (not a large project), they still need to sell 10 copies to make money. Some programs are targeted enough that they cannot sell more that 10 copies. What if they used 20 developers over 2 years? Now your looking at 100 copies or more to break even. How many copies will your compititors sell? How many customers are there for this product? Of course what the market will bear is always a concern. If you can get everyone to pay $50k for a product you can make a profit on at $5k, why not make yourself a multi-millionier?

[Stan Shannon]

50K would be cheap compared to most apps I have worked on over the last 20 years or so. What you have to keep in mind, however, is that the customer is actually paying for support and not so much the code itself. The customer is paying for a complete solution to a complex set of business related problems. Sure, I could have written the same application and sold it for a fraction of that cost, but could I have provided support to all the customers who might have bought it for that price? No way.

[Guilio karadanais]

That's why we have an OpenSource community, so the average Joe can start a business with free open source software that often exceeds most commercial applications ( Due to a community involvement and general aim to improve software). The chances are there is a Free, enterprise level piece of software out there that can do the job. I am new to Development ( 1 year) and am amazed at how much some software houses charging for average software, the reality I've found is the next killer app is just a few clicks away at sourceforge.net. I think we need to come together as developers and write better applications, by means of Open Source and Code sharing, than go the route of some software company's that charge the world for standard rate code. Remember for every overpriced piece of software there is a free open source equivalent. But thats just my view

[El Corazon]

Rocky Moore wrote: but it is hard to believe software selling at $50K. I know, some will say that there is needs and it is all about supply and demand and that someone has to pay for research, etc, but $50K... Seems at that rate you would hire a few programmers, build it yourself and then market it for $5K per copy and take the market... yes and no.... the short answer. The long answer: There are reasons for paying 50K (or more) instead of hiring programmers. A) you are handing off the support costs B) There are groups (like government) who don't like reinventing the wheel, no matter what the cost. So you get pats on the back for buying COTS (commercial off the shelf) software even if it costs twice as much as writing yourself. C) If the product is like an API or a tool, you can focus your paid programmers on doing that much more above and beyond what was written and make it even better. D) Sometimes you have a tight deadline, you could write it in a year or two, but they need it finished in 6 months. Tossing more programmers does not always result in shorter time-scales, especially if they are new-hires. We have one tool for 60K for generating landscapes, one modeling program for 100K, developers license for 3D API at 10K each (we have 3 now), plus annual maintenance costs with each. And we are considered cheap-scapes for the visualization biz, most people eagerly hand out 120K plus 10K per run-time (end user) machine. But buying the tools for landscape generation, we multiplied our terrain density output by 10 overnight, and I was able to focus on physics and math extensions specifically for customers, so we short-cut development time by 1 or 2 years by buying the tools and API to jump-start production. This is fairly normal for my biz, and like I said, we are considered cheap-scapes for paying that little. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

[Jorgen Sigvardsson]

Stan Shannon wrote: The customer is paying for a complete solution to a complex set of business related problems. Not only that. The customer sees the cost as an investment to generate future revenue. For the average home user, there is no future revenue. Business related software is thus more expensive than home user software, because their worth is higher. -- Weiter, weiter, ins verderben. Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben. I blog too now[^]

[Jorgen Sigvardsson]

Guilio karadanais wrote: That's why we have an OpenSource community, so the average Joe can start a business with free open source software that often exceeds most commercial applications ( Due to a community involvement and general aim to improve software). The chances are there is a Free, enterprise level piece of software out there that can do the job. Open source projects tackle products, which is a sell by the volume market. Complete solutions, specialized for the paying customer, is something which open source will never be able to compete with. That is why I'm not that afraid of open source business in the line of work I do. I do however understand why developers who make pure volume products are upset - open source is "stealing" pieces of their market. Guilio karadanais wrote: Remember for every overpriced piece of software there is a free open source equivalent. But thats just my view But for each such open source product, there's a lot more work to be done. With an MSDN subscription, you get all relevant patches and upgrades. Heck, you even get relatively pertinent documentation. With open source, you'll have to gather all that information yourself. I.e., you get no services with open source, unless you hire someone for it. If you want the same level of support and services with open source, you'll see that there is not much difference between costs. And no, you as a developer being able to upgrade your compiler toolset doesn't count. At least not in a larger development environment. Why? Because it may be important that all developers on a project use the same compiler toolsets. If developer A uses version X of the toolset, and developer B uses version Y, both toolsets having different features and/or bugs, you're in for a QA nightmare. How could you possibly guarantee anything...? So, you'd have to organize all developers to update their toolsets whenever it is needed. That means that someone must organize it, and that all developers must know how to upgrade. And this may or may not be a trivial task. Most likely, someone is going to be paid to do this. I'd rather pay $2000 a year per subscription than hire someone to do it for me. -- Weiter, weiter, ins verderben. Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben. I blog too now[^]

[Colin Angus Mackay]

I piece of software I use to work on cost £35K per seat (although there was discounts for companies ordering a large number of seats). In the UK there were only 90 companies using the software and it would have been much much more expensive if they were to try to develop the same thing in-house. Rocky Moore wrote: $50K... Seems at that rate you would hire a few programmers, build it yourself and then market it for $5K per copy and take the market... What does $50K buy you in developer time. One permanent employee for per year? A contractor for 4 months? Now, how much time did it take to develop the product? The software I quoted above took a team of 20 developers 5 years to get it into any reasonable state that the company was able to sell it easily. And by an easy sell I mean 6 to 9 months of a sales person's (+ technical pre-sales team developing a demo) time negociating the deal. Before that they were practically giving the product away at £5K per seat in order to build market share and build up reference sites.

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[Neville Franks]

Marc Clifton wrote: What I love about sites like this one is that you can stare at them for hours and not have a clue what it is that they actually do or why anyone would need their tools. It's all marketing phrases strung together like Christmas tree lights, each one twinkling "read me! I'm important! I help sell this product!" Belch. That's my take exactly. I just looked at www.ultimus.com mentioned in an earlier reply and I haven't got a clue what these people are about. I love it when you see the standard library photo of 3 people (usually 2 men and a women) staring at a PC. Then you see the same people on another site.:-D I got a little miffed yesterday when someone posted on my forums that my site www.surfulater.com [^]wasn't corporate enough. All I can say is amen, that's how I want it. Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows www.getsoft.com and Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf"

[Neville Franks]

I wonder how you or if you plan to make a career in open source software and how you will get paid for this? Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows www.getsoft.com and Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf"

[Marc Clifton]

Neville Franks wrote: I love it when you see the standard library photo of 3 people Yeah, and it's usually three people that try to represent black, white, Asian, male, and female. :rolleyes: Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing