From: masimo@netcom.com (Michael Maas)
Subject: Re: Any opinions on Borland?
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 18:05:08 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.054509.1319@qiclab.scn.rain.com> drazil@qiclab.scn.rain.com (Devin Ben-Hur) writes:
>In article <BxB2Ep.6GC@apollo.hp.com> goykhman_a@apollo.hp.com (Alex Goykhman) writes:
>>    I think the market may be concerned with a price war that is about 
>>    to hit the PC software market.
>
>
>Which is interesting because the software price war has been going on
>for some time, much longer than the recent painful system hardware
>price war.  Borland fired the first gun about a decade ago with $29.95
>Turbo Pascal, and re-invented the software price war with the
>"competitive upgrade" to the original Quattro (from 1-2-3) about five
>years ago.  In the last few years, everyone has adopted competitive
>upgrades and the real cost of software to most purchasers has dropped
>by 50-75%.
>-- 
>Devin Ben-Hur        [drazil@qiclab.scn.rain.com]
>"Your civilization makes us laugh..."


I think there is yet another phenomena occurring.  Many of the software 
companies in the pc environment got their start on fairly simple single
user software.  Since then they have moved into much more complex but still
single user software.  Actually single user is one metric and single machine
is another.  So most early software was SUSM and was easily handled by the
client without much assistance from the vendor.  The next step was to move
to more advanced software still on the SUSM scale but advanced and complex
enough that vendors had not only to have technical support but also bb's 
which were the preferred way of distributing patches.

Now we have moved from that SUSM environment into the MUMM environment.
This environment has been around of course, as long as computers have been
around, the big difference is that it was always handled by the mainframe
and mini companies such as DEC, IBM, DG, ADR, CA, Software AG, Pansophic
etc.  Each of these companies have or in some cases had, regular releases
of their software, and intermediate releases as well as quite sophisticated
programs for patching object code.  They also had field support as well as
telephone support and all this was necessary because the products were too
complex for the user to depend on themselves.

The downsizing that is going on now is bringing equally complex and sometimes
more complex software to a group of clients who have been able to depend on
themselves.  They are no longer able to do so, and the vendors are being forced
to enhance their support organizations to keep these clients out of trouble or
as is more often the case, to get them out of trouble. 

This will almost certainly result in increased software costs over time as the
products get more and more complex and more and more widespread.

For example, Paradox or Dbase are fairly straightforward products, and even
with multiuser features added to them can easily be supported by a telephone
only support staff.  Borland's acquired product, Interbase, however is a 
different level of software.  If Borland intends to be successful with this
product they are going to have to develop field support similar to that of
the other major dbms vendors Oracle, Informix, Sybase etc.  In addition, in
order to compete successfully in that marketplace they may well have to move
to a direct sales force.  All of this will add cost to the products.  I think
that this will be true in general as software becomes more complex.

I currently work in tech support for one of the rdbms vendors, and I used to
work for a mainframe dbms vendor.  I can state without doubt that the users
of our current software are both less sophisticated than were the mainframe
users, and less aware of the possibilities of failure of the hardware/software
and thus less prepared when it does happen.  The users depend on the vendors to
make up this difference, and the vendors will have to do so to be successful in
the marketplace.  All of this is going to result in higher prices for software
with more complexity in the software.  There is a big difference between a
multiuser/multithreaded/multiprocess rdbms and a word processor, spreadsheet,
or compiler.  Moreover, as the word processors and spreadsheets move into the
workgroup (translate that to multiuser) those products are also going to get
more and more complex.  To wit, Lotus is already lining up consulting orgs
to support Notes.

Just some thoughts and opinions.

Mike
From: sjb@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Stuart Bobb)
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 17:20:13 GMT
Subject: Re: Boycott Colorado
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA