Fri 02 Oct 2009
The Art of Pricing
Category : Commentary/TheArtofPricing.txt
There's a book by that name that I've read. It has a five-star rating at Amazon and I remember it being one of those books that I would call nourishing, in terms of its contribution to my development as a business-person. Then there's also Chris Anderson's "Free - The Future of a Radical Price" that I'm reading now. It's another day in my personal, custom-made, self-learning MBA course, with a good measure of practical experience thrown in. That's what it's like doing this - designing, building and selling software on the Internet. I've only now managed to get a break from coding to think about pricing (no doubt getting things ass-backwards, as the Americans would say). But Snow Leopard is so good that I want to get everyone who has ever used any of our products to get on the platform, so we can build on up with the good stuff from this point on. I've changed our system to make it possible for everyone to upgrade to the equivalent Snow Leopard product for USD $15 if they've ever bought any one of our previous products, including going all the way back to Postfix Enabler for Tiger. Now that's $15 for a "pro-level" product that's superior, in terms of features, to the product that it replaced in Leopard, and which a significant number of people have shown they're willing to pay $25 for at full price. So I believe $15 represents good value for those who're upgrading to Snow Leopard. But why $15? After 5 years doing this, I think it's absolutely the lowest point to make this type of venture worthwhile. To compete, someone with another product will have to come in at $10, but that's a very painful place to be in. Just ask me - I've been at that level for 4 of the last 5 years. And 15 USD now has lost so much of its value following the slide in the US$ exchange rate that it's a lot closer to the 10 USD of 4 years ago than it is to 15. Then there is the element of charging what the market will bear. What has surprised me is the number of people paying the full 25 USD price - even people who could have taken advantage of the upgrade offer if they had wanted to. Over the years I've been bouyed by the sentiments (if not the money) of these people who've signalled with their purchases that the product has at least met, if not exceeded, their expectations even at full price. But setting the price higher than that could create a shelter for a competing product to slip under. Or at least that's the theory from MBA-land. But then, what do I know? I'm still learning. Now, off with the suit, and back to coding.
Posted at 4:12PM UTC | permalink
DNS Enabler 4.0.3
Category : Technology/DNSEnabler4dot0dot3.txt
I've been working on DNS Enabler for Snow Leopard. I've released DNS Enabler 4.0.3, a day after releasing 4.0.2, because while working on adding CIDR-formatted IP address support to 4.0.2, I've realised that people do use DNS Enabler to manage a whole lot of domains. So, that one line data entry field for Virtual Domains is getting to be vastly inadequate. (And that goes the same for MailServe). I've extended the length of that field, for the moment, while I take some think about how I should be handling this going forward : I'm very happy seeing these CIDR addresses (e.g., 12.53.154.64/30.65) in DNS Enabler because those slashes had been rather difficult to handle - they messed with sed when I do text substitution in the Unix scripts. And you're only asking for trouble when you name Unix files with a slash in their name. But I got that sorted out in the end and learnt a few more things about Unix shell programming along the way. By now I think, comparing features, DNS Enabler is on par with the Quick DNS Pro from Men and Mice that I used to use from some time back. Maybe it can already do some things better and faster. But if I can add BIND views and custom BIND options support, now that would be really taking things forward quite a bit. And I remember paying $200/$300 for Quick DNS Pro then. If only I can find the cheek to charge that much for DNS Enabler :-)
Posted at 8:03AM UTC | permalink
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