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Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

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Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#41

Post by shard »

sdfx wrote: post #33
Chickencha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, market segmentation is different when it comes to software. In your text editor example, the author can add an SFTP feature, but once it's coded it's coded. There's no extra cost to ship out all software with that feature after it's coded, except perhaps some extra support costs. (I imagine those would be pretty minimal.) At that point, I only see two reasons to segment the market from the users' perspective:…

>There's no extra cost to ship out all software with that feature after it's coded By this logic, Chipmaker should only sell their most powerful processors, because the actual manufacturing-cost is not really the reason for the price difference between a top of the line i7 processor and a different one with lower specs. You can look at it from a different angle: Let's say you have a powerful program and you are charg…

I think that actual manufacturing costs are often the reason for price differences between a top of the line and one with lower specs. The processor dies are huge and costly, and throwing out non-perfect dies is undesirable. Due to the intricacies of silicon manufacturing, the same design can have different maximum speeds on different dies, and due to defects, the same design can have different operational sections on different dies. This leads to speed grading and the disabling of cores/caches, and hence a whole line of chips from one design.

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#42

Post by maw »

gizmo wrote: post #27
CodeMage wrote: post #14

As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation. Let's keep one thing clear, if you'r…

> a reasonable technical explanation Alright, I can come up with a reasonable explanation: For databases and servers a lot of bugs and corner cases are only hit by servers that get loads and loads of traffic. Fixing those bugs cost a significant amount of money. By charging more to the high-traffic servers the cost of fixing those bugs can be justified. It is also fair, in a sense, because only the high throughput se…

Exactly. And to be fair, Novell and Red Hat have done similar things with SLE and RHEL and, come to think of it, openSUSE and Fedora. Since the code's open, it isn't quite the same, but both offer different levels of service and maintenance, available at varying prices.

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#43

Post by 10ren »

A company needing over 32GB of server RAM is getting more value from it than if they only needed 1-4GB RAM. It's a measure of customer value created.

I suspect Jeff is upset mainly because he didn't know. 32GB is an arbitrary seeming boundary, that wasn't signaled clearly (enough to him). He breathed to life a plan to live his ideal of RAM-cheap, coder-dear. He went to the trouble to buy RAM. And to pay for it. And to install it... All the while expecting that it would just work.

He feels ripped off, tripped up, cheated, deceived and abused. He didn't get what he paid for (specifically: what he thought he was paying for). This a problem of expectation-management. And Jeff is quite right to blame marketing. And he's right to punish them. As his article has. Go Jeff!

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#44

Post by _cbsz »

mmc wrote: post #32
drcode wrote: post #3

can we please stop using the word "awesome" already? :)

I say, pick your battles. "fail" as a noun rankles far more. Killing "(epic) fail" would be truly awesome. I'd even be willing to bring back "tubular" in trade.

What if we change the slang to "flail", which is at least both a noun and a verb?

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#45

Post by billswift »

CodeMage wrote: post #35
Chickencha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, market segmentation is different when it comes to software. In your text editor example, the author can add an SFTP feature, but once it's coded it's coded. There's no extra cost to ship out all software with that feature after it's coded, except perhaps some extra support costs. (I imagine those would be pretty minimal.) At that point, I only see two reasons to segment the market from the users' perspective:…

I'm not sure how having different editions of the same software hurts users, but maybe I'm just applying a different grade of the same meaning to the word "hurt" ;) I suppose that the author could let users drive new features by making a list of proposed features and having users donate money towards the implementation of those features. I'm pretty sure I've seen that somewhere. But the segmentation seems to be the e…

It increases the price to the users of the "advanced" version, because by keeping 2 versions the seller has to collect AT LEAST enough extra to pay for the increased overhead costs of dealing with 2 versions.

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#46

Post by nopassrecover »

This is like complaining that your student version has the artificial limitation that you can't use it for commercial use. If you needed to use more than 32GB of ram, something only heavy duty commercial servers would need, then you buy the heavy duty commercial version of Windows Server.

You have paid a price before that was in essence subsidised by the higher-end commercial users - now you are one of them (Congratulations!) and get to "subsidise" standard versions for the rest of us.

It's the same theory as scaled taxation (which is a different argument as government has separate responsibilities than business) - think of yourself as in the highest earning bracket now.

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#47

Post by barrkel »

CodeMage wrote: post #14

As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation. Let's keep one thing clear, if you'r…

It's not "ridiculous"; the "technical explanation" is because it makes more money. It's just business.

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#48

Post by smokinn »

dmpayton wrote: post #25
mattmcknight wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He uses SQL Server, of course. The root cause is that Joel used to work for Microsoft. Awesome.

Not just that, but Jeff is a .Net programmer (IIRC, S.O. is written in C#).

And he spent a good chunk of his career as an evangelist for a Microsoft shop. (Not Microsoft itself but a "Microsoft partner")

Re: Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

#49

Post by patio11 »

lunchbox wrote: post #39
CodeMage wrote: post #14

As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation. Let's keep one thing clear, if you'r…

> What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. There is no technical explanation. It's purely for business reasons. This limitation seems artificial, but it's no different from any other software product that comes in multiple editions: A software company (e.g. Adobe, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft) develops a software product;…

This limitation seems artificial, but it's no different from any other software product that comes in multiple editions

Right. For example, if a totally hypothetical individual developed a collaborative knowledge-base system and offered it as a service, they might decide to arbitrarily segment the market based on page views.

Now, one might make the argument that there is actually a cost associated with page views whereas there is not a cost with having your software recognize all the memory on a third party's machine, but just between us businessmen we can agree that that is malarky. For one, the cost of a marginal pageview is too small to be measured but the price to the customer of that page view is about ten thousand dollars in the first year if it was their millionth-and-first page view in January. For another, the cost the 9 million page views separating tier #2 of the hypothetical service from tier #1 is far, far less than the pricing differential.

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