Camels and Rubber Duckies - Joel on Software

Camels and Rubber Duckies - Joel on Software: "By comparison, look at BEA. Big company. Big price tag. The price alone means almost nobody has experience with their product. Nobody comes out of college and starts a dotcom using BEA technology, because they couldn't afford BEA technology in college. A lot of other good technologies have doomed themselves with high prices: Apple WebObjects was irrelevant as an application server because it started at $50,000. Who cared how good it was? Nobody ever used it! Anything made by Rational. The only way these products get into the hands of users is with an expensive full-frontal sales pitch. At these prices, the sales pitch is made to the executive, not the techie. The techies may well actively resist bad technology with good sales that the executives force down their throats. We have lots of FogBugz customers who have high-priced Remedy, Rational, or Mercury products sitting on the shelves after investments of well over $100,000, because that software isn't good enough to actually use. Then they buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of FogBugz and that's the product they really use. The Rational salesperson is laughing at me, because I have $2000 in the bank and he has $100,000. But I have far more customers than he does, and they're all using my product, and evangelizing it, and spreading it, while Rational customers either (a) don't use it or (b) use it and can't stand it. But he's still laughing at me from his 40 foot yacht while I play with rubber duckies in the bathtub. Like I said, all three methods work fine. But cheaper prices is like buying advertising and as such is an investment in the future.

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