Finding a price point

Joel on Software – Camels
and Rubber Duckies

Joel Spolsky has a good article discussing various product pricing strategies and the inherent do’s and do not’s of software pricing.

His arguments for the most part are common sense but are dependent (imho) on the type of software you’re selling. People, I mean customers, always want to
think they’re getting the best deal. But how do you maintain that when you’ve got customer X who knows that customer Y paid amount Z and he wants to pay
Z-some amount. You don’t want to erode potential or realized good will with either customer so what do you do?

You don’t want to start selling site licences. By doing so you’ve set an arbitrary barrier on profit selling to large customers who could afford to pay mo
re. You’re giving a break to the very people that probably don’t need one.

Perhaps you’re interested in building long term relationships and building barriers to entry within a particular institution. You’re prepared to sell them
a system at a base price but obviously that system won’t exactly meet their needs (at least members of both parties believe that). So on top of that base
price you add a series of professional services paid for in part by the customer. The customer believes they’re getting a customized deal and a certain a
mount of say into how the software is going to work for them. They like this. From the companie’s point of view, what one customer wants is probably not
much different (at least part of the same superset of functionality) from what other potential customers would like to see. So basically, you have someone
else paying a portion of your development fees and you’re getting valuable insight into the direction of the industry you’re in (at least from the custome
rs perspective).

I’d recommend reading Joel’s article. He obviously has had success finding a suitable price point for FogBugz.

Adam Barr’s Favourite Spots on MS Campus

[Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Top Ten Favorite Spots on the Microsoft Campus][1]

Never been there myself, although I have been meaning to visit a friend of mine who has been working there for the past couple years. The above link is MS
employee Adam Barr’s top ten favourite (I’m cdn) places on campus.

Looks like a nice place to work, I enjoy some sembelence of nature and do get a bit of it at my current place of employment (the [Vancouver Island Technology Park][2]). Not quite on the same scale but the chickens and horses I drive by on the way into work must be worth somethin
g.

[1]: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2004/12/topte
nfavorit.html "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Top Ten Favorite Spots on the Microsoft Campus" [2]: http://www.vitp.
ca/

Are we having fun yet

Haven’t had time to blog in over a month. Actually I did have a series of vacation days in December but you know how those tend to play out with a startup
. It has been an entertaining attempt getting through a seemingly endless pile of holiday season blog posts.

I agree for the most part with Adam Bosworth’s We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We
have been building on the foundations of others for generations, no industry can argue against this. We’re lazy software developers, why would we want to
re-implement memory management routines or layout managers. Sure this is required in some situations, but for the most part we should be encouraging re-u
se. There’s a reason why Java and C# have been successful, they make developer’s lives easier by providing an extensive foundation framework. In my most
recent experience, we wouldn’t be successful if we couldn’t leverge the work of others. It speeds development and increases the likelyhood that a young
companies is able to market (in a timely and anticipated fashion).

I don’t think it’s the job of a corporation to “give back” in a way dictated by any one group of end users. Google is out to make a profit, and a side-eff
ect of them making this profit is providing web searches, desktop searches, newsgroup searches, library searches….you name it. Likewise for the Yahoo’s,
Jeeves and even MS searches. Should we expect the employees of these companies to give back to the communities? It would be nice but I’d be happy with c
ontinued innovation in the respective fields of expertise and the continued availability of free services.

Hey Google, I’m tired of paying for software X, can you buy that company and make the software free…. Would be nice wouldn’t it.