Re: Ada vendors and the art of selling used cars

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

O.K. It is a nit - I stand corrected. The idea is that you go to your local
CompUSA and buy a copy off the shelf and basically its yours and yours
alone. If you have a team of 5 guys you go buy 5 boxes at CompUSA and each
guy gets one at 5x cost to you.

As long as the price is half-way reasonable, this model works fine. As long
as a company provides some way of getting volume discounts (and maybe
various levels of support?) larger projects can figure out how to make it
work for them.

FWIW, I used to get a quarterly update in the mail with MSVC++ and that was
about the extent of the support. It was also about all I needed. Assuming a
similar Ada product, with a good collection of documentation and a quarterly
update for 1 year that included code revisions and other real changes (not
just some window dressing to make the update look like you're getting
something.) I'd see that as worth $500..$1000 to a serious hobbyist or small
project or startup venture. The answer to customers who want traditional DoD
levels of support is to say "Yeah, sure. We've got that. It just costs
extra. Get out your government Visa card and call 1.900.xxx.yyyy...."
Otherwise, just ship me a product that installs flawlessly and works
properly and has good documentation and I'll be happy to live with it on my
own. (Don't make me call you and fume at you because your stupid, freakin
software won't install or start up and then have you tell me that telephone
support costs extra. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:GUug7.9130$2u.65334@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <9ltq1q$54r$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
> Just a minor nit: The last time I bought VC++, it was licesed to a single
> *user*. The license explicitly allows me to install it on every machine I
use,
> but no-one other than me is to use the software.
>