Re: Pilgrim's progress at the medicine show

Tim Schaefer (tschaefe@gate.net) wrote: : Pilgrim's Progress or Why do I need New Era - Part II : by Tim Schaefer [ stuff deleted ] : Phil White, if you're reading this, we won't hold it against you if you lower : the price. You'll be considered a genius every bit as much as Bill Gates. : Fire the whole marketing department and blame it on THEM. The squeals may : die down here, and big companies that can afford the current pricing will : probably buy your New Era. But you will NEVER get the market share you : really need to succeed. As a diehard INFORMIX booster I want to see you : succeed, because that will help me succeed. : You have Dynamic Scalable Architecture, why not Dynamic Scalable Pricing? Dynamic Scalable Pricing is *EXACTLY* what Phil would *LOVE* to do. But I get the distinct impression that you would be amongst the first to squeal when you discovered that you paid more than Joe Bloggs (or John Doe) next door. Now, as you will no doubt immediately realise, Phil might not be too upset by your squeals, but he sure as h*** doesn't want to have to deal with such squeals coming from Lockheed, Boeing, Citibank, Uncle Sam, Hyatt and their ilk! I can remember similar complaints and incredulity about I-4GL pricing back in '86. All right, you can argue that I-4GL never became more than a niche product compared to COBOL, but I wouldn't mind having earnt even a tiny royalty percentage on it! I don't think Phil expects or intends that NewEra would obliterate VB (and certainly not VC++, as somebody on the original thread seemed to think!). I doubt that he feels that it needs to. There will always be people out there that can see the difference between a socket set and a set of spanners and are prepared to accept that they can be priced differently. And there will also be plenty of people that buy both!. : Look at the Trojan Horse marketing strategy of Microsoft and you can't go : wrong. Yet how many of the companies that followed that advice can you name, or even remember? Informix' blackest period financially was when they were trying to copy Oracle. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. IMHO They got back on track by concentrating on their own strengths, not by trying to emulate someone elses. -- graeme -- Disclaimer: The author's opinions are his own, and not necessarily those of Pyramid Technology Ltd. or Pyramid Technology Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -m------- Graeme Sargent Voice: +44 (0)252 373035 ---mmm----- Senior Database Consultant Fax : +44 (0)252 373135 -----mmmmm--- Pyramid Technology Ltd. Telex: Tell who??? -------mmmmmmm- Farnborough, Hants GU14 7PL Email: graeme@pyra.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the technology. The tricky bit is learning how to use it.