Sale Strategy

[Fairlight]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 12:47:29PM -0400, Brian K. White thus spoke:
> >Point out the fact that they're -still- making out like bandits, and they
> >have been for 36 years.  Have they been paying a lease on that software for
> >three and a half decades?  No?  Then they're making out like bandits.
> 
> When my grandfather bought a hammer in 1920, and I still have it
> today, we aren't bandits who deprived the hammer manufacturer of
> livelihoods.

There's a difference, though.  A hammer is a physical good.  IP is entirely
another creature.  I chose the music recording industry as a baseline
comparison for a reason:  royalties are a legitimate revenue stream.

> I don't cry for poor filepro at all. The only reason we still use it

Nor I, per se.  I'm just saying that if it's truly a viable market model
(and Adobe, East/West, Microsoft, and several other notables seem to
indicate that it is), then anyone should be able to do it.  To -not- do it
is to get burned.  If I'm going to say I should be able to do it, then I
have to be able to say fP Tech should be able to do it.

> is not because it's so awesome nothing else can do the job thus
> proving it's value. At this point every single seat license is pure
> duress. All the years of code investment are utterly unportable to
> anything else, and so there is no way to continue using your OWN
> code that you wrote yourself, without paying filepro, and the
> process of migrating is essentially 100% loss starting over, which
> means it takes a long time, which means you have to keep paying
> filepro for a long time after you no longer actually want their
> product. It's the worst example of a trap. It's the poster child for
> why it's worth paying twice, three, ten times as much in development
> costs to invest in "free" software, just to avoid this trap.

The runtime license cost does make a bitter pill.  I could fully see the
development licenses going subscription, but move to a freely available
runtime like dBase did (and I think Filemaker Pro does, although I'd have
to look it up).

That said, if you look at it in a certain light, knowing you're getting
zero percent ongoing return from something which is driving 90%+ of
someone's very lucrative enterprise is also a bitter pill.  That applies to
my own software, or any developer who writes enterprise-grade software.

m->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.