Re: Bundling of layered software ...

[buff%pravda@gatech.edu (Richard Billington)]

  Date: Fri, 23 Mar 90 11:14 EST
  From: GRoberts@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Gary Roberts)

  What the above correspondent is asking for is a price reduction, not
  bundling.  In fact, he is making the classic marketing argument for
  UNBUNDLING of products-- i.e., if he is having trouble comparing $9.5K
  Genera with $2.5K (actually $4K, but that's a side issue) Lucid, then to
  resolve that problem, Symbolics should unbundle the Lucid-equivalent
  functionality and sell it for $2.5K, and sell the Genera "value-added"
  for whatever the market will bear.

Speaking for myself, what I'm really looking for is a discussion amongst
users to see what they feel the "lisp environment of the future" is going
to look like. My bet is that it will include a hypertext editor and an
oodb extension to lisp. At this point, I'd guess we're at about 50/50 (with
regard to agreement) amongst those who've expressed an opinion. Statice and
Concordia are a part of the discussion because they're the closest products
Symbolics has to offer along those lines.

But, getting back to this price thing: there are two ways to make money,
sell lots of something for less, or sell a few of something for more.
My argument is that if concordia- and statice-like capabilities are the
next logical extension to the lisp programming (and runtime) environment,
then Symbolics should be encouraged to market them differently - as part
of this, lowering the price.

But please, listen to what your users are telling you about their
vision of the future and their needs, rather than simply hearing it as
price gouging. Symbolics has long suffered from being viewed as a
specialized tool because that's the way it's been marketed, priced,
and sold. The way concordia and statice are packaged and marketed now
encourages that perception of them. I think that may be wrong, and I
hope most of the participants in this discussion are arguing this
point, not price gouging.