Re: Price of Professional Edition

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 04:32:19PM -0400, jerry ely wrote:

> An expamle would be, I might buy anyones alternate OS out of
> frustration with the one I have. I consider that an impulse
> buy. BUT, for example, if I am only comparing OS and my present one
> is 250.00, would I buy the 50.00 or 150 copy of the alternate
> solution. My point is, to the casual shopper, THIS IS WHAT THEY
> SEE. If 8.0 is received as well as we think, maybe 8.1 marketing
> could look into helping fix this confusion.

While this is a real issue, and may be particularly vexing in the OS
arena where Red Hat plays (if the believed goal is to covert users
from other OSes to Linux, and specifically Red Hat), it is NOT limited
to Red Hat, or just to OSes.  It is often difficult to determine the
differences between multiple version of the same software product, let
alone whether or not the price for the "professional" version is
really worth the added expense.

My most recent experience in this area was in purchasing a virus
program for my Win box.  Having used Norton AntiVirus in the past, I
looked to the 2003 version of the product as an initial choice.  But
damned if I could easily determine the difference between the
"vanilla" and the "professional" versions.  After snooping about a bit
on the web (Symantec's site obfuscates with the best of them), I
finally had to visit a store, and compare the boxes side-by-side, to
determine that the $10-20 more expensive "pro" version was of no added
value to me.

I'm sure, however, that if someone didn't want to spend the time
looking at the fine print, the difference in price was small enough
that they might simply have bought the "pro" version because "pro"
must equate to "better", and the price difference wasn't huge.

At least in the Red Hat case, the 3X / $100 price difference gives you
pause to consider your needs.

But the main point is, the problem isn't unique to Red Hat or to
Linux.  It's a fundamental confusion point in the retail software
channel in general.

Now if Red Hat would just bring back the DMA disc of yore, I would
feel better about paying more for the Pro version (why I care about
the DMA disc is a long story not really germane to this exchange).