<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.10.3"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Thu, 2007-25-01 at 12:02 +0100, Matthew East wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> Personally, I think it's nonsense. I don't feel safer with software if I have to pay for it or not, what's important to me is the reputation of the software, its stability and security history. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> You are not a businessman, then, obviously. Anecdote time: I worked for a company for a while that made a niche product for a niche market.  (Niche of a niche, basically.)  It was small, but it was doing OK.  The software was stable and the company had a good rep. But it wasn't growing the way it should have been. The owners of the company hired a marketing consultant to take the company to the next level.  After reviewing everything, the consultant basically said "you're selling the product too cheaply".  He recommended the company raise its prices across the board -- the core product went up by an order of magnitude -- and also recommended a set of packages be sliced off the core and sold as extras. This was all timed to coincide with the next big release of the software.  Sales shot through the roof and the company reached its next level. A few years later I switched companies and again witnessed this process.  In this case the product was a toolkit.  Again the recommendation from our marketing staff (in-house this time, not out-of-house) was to raise the prices across the board.  And again sales boomed.  This time there wasn't even the excuse of a new major release to fall back on to explain away the sales increase.  We just raised our prices across the board and sold exactly the same product in exactly the same market.  And yet sales boomed. In yet another company, I was tasked with technical evaluations of some software we needed.  (Toolkits again.)  I had five vendors' products to evaluate and a set of criterion by which to evaluate.  (This is actually quite rare in business! <IMG SRC="cid:1169725124.1674.10.camel@localhost.localdomain" ALIGN="middle" ALT=":O" BORDER="0">)  I did the evaluation right down to evaluating technical support response times.  One company stood out.  They met all of the technical requirements and had the best tech support by far.  (Further, their product and its documentation were so good I doubted we'd need to use their tech support.)  And they were the cheapest.  Eventually the second-place company was chosen -- despite their product (although of high quality) being underdocumented and their technical support being, basically, "how much did you say you want to pay?"-level quality.  The reason given?  Their price was four times higher, so they obviously were much more confident in their product.  (That's almost exactly the wording used.) It is a mistake to think that businesses are run by rational people who crunch the numbers.  There's a whole lot of other factors involved including prestige, empire building and even softer influences than these two.  And lurking somewhere in the back of your average buyer's mind is the notion that if a company charges, say, $10,000 for a product and another company charges only $1000 for it, the first product must be ten times better.  (Yes, I know it's hogwash.  You know it's hogwash.  That's probably why we're not CEOs, CFOs or CTOs....) Then there is also the liability angle.  If you use a free-as-in-beer product, there's been no exchange of consideration and, therefore, little to no room for tortious action.  Companies -- large enterprises especially -- just *LOVE* to have the ability to point fingers. So, in short (I know, too late!), I agree with that article.  The "free-as-in-beer" product does hurt Ubuntu in the Enterprise. <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> --  Michael T. Richter Email: ttmrichter@gmail.com, mtr1966@hotpop.com MSN: ttmrichter@hotmail.com, mtr1966@hotmail.com; YIM: michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber: mtr1966@jabber.cn "Thanks to the Court's decision, only clean Indians or colored people other than Kaffirs, can now travel in the trams." --Mahatma Gandhi </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>