"keith ;-)" wrote in message
...


Looks a very good bit of software but I think very expensive at $175,at
the
end of the day I bet it doesn't take more effort to make than a computer
game as most of the info is obtainable.But you can get a pc game for upto
$50,I would be surprised if above this.And personally I find having to pay
for updates a rip off when you have paid all that for the software in the
first place.
Keith

There is much more that goes into the pricing of a software product than the
programming effort required to produce it. For example, there is the market
size, and the nature of that market. A consumer product will see a much
larger market than a commercial product, but a consumer product sold for
hundreds of dollars will not capture nearly as much of the market as would
one costing about $50. But one costing $5 will not likely survive either
because at that price, most would believe, fairly or not, that it is just
cheap garbage. A commercial product, OTOH, will normally cost a few hundred
dollars, if sold using a convential business model, and I have seen prices
go up through thousands of dollars and even millions of dollars, depending
on the nature of the software and the nature of the business it serves.

I have developed decision support software for a market in which there may
be, at most, a few thousand potential clients in North America, and that
software was sold for C$25,000 for one license. It was a commercial success
however, because those customers who bought it had an urgent need for it,
and the company that paid to have it developed still uses it to support
consulting services that simply would be impossible without it. It is
certain, though, that it takes much much more than six man-years to develop
a decent computer game. A custom product, which by definition has a market
comprised of only one customer, that took six man-years to develop could
well carry a price of a million dollars or more.

From what I saw on that company's website, and the nature of the software
being sold, that product may well be a bargain at $1000 if it proves to be
of good quality. And we haven't begun to talk about business models based
on open source software.

As for paying for updates, much depends on the nature of the updates. If
the updates are simply bug fixes, the usual practice, at least among
ethical software developers, is that such updates are available free of
charge; a kind of warranty service. However, if the updates involve
primarily new features or additional useful data, that involves an
improvement of the product and it makes no more sense to provide those free
of charge than it does for an automaker to upgrade your car to the current
model year for free. Look at MS Windows, for example. There are still
regular updates for MS Windows 2000 Pro, for free. At the same time,
Microsoft will not upgrade a license to use Windows 2000 to a license to use
Windows XP without charging you for the priviledge. (This is in no way an
endorsement of MS products.) How often such an upgrade would be appropriate
will, of course, depend on the nature of the product.

NB: I do not have any financial interest in, or business relationship with,
the company that produced the software described in this thread.

Cheers,

Ted

--
R.E. (Ted) Byers, Ph.D., Ed.D.
R & D Decision Support Solutions
http://www.randddecisionsupportsolutions.com/
Healthy Living Through Informed Decision Making