Ohhh goody, PDA software price wars!

The great thing about software these days is that a
good programmer can have a nice little business over
the Internet so long as it's cheap to acquire customers.

The soaring community is a small market and the racing/cross-count
ry segment is a small proportion of that small market.
But, it's also pretty close-knit (with the Internet
it's truly global). So, with essentially no cost of
goods and very little marketing or distribution cost,
a team of one or two programmers can earn a decent
living. Say, $150/copy (net) x 1-2,000 new copies per
year yields a pretty solid, if not extravagant, income.
Even the upgrade business isn't too bad at $50/copy
if you can keep a significant portion of your overall
installed base renewing each year.

Free software works, but only to the extent that you
can keep a community of talented volunteers interested
in continuing to innovate and support the product (the
latter being the tougher part since programmers tend
not to like all the administrative BS associate with
product support).

Personally, I don't find a few hundred bucks to be
all that much to pay for what these products do in
terms of increasing the enjoyment and safety of cross-country
and racing flights - not to mention the potential for
improvement in overall pilot performance. I bought
a copy of WinPilot Pro last year and paid for copy
of SeeYou mobile. Consider it a subsidy for continued
development. They're both quite good pieces of software
and I hope they both prove successful in the market.


At 16:48 20 February 2004, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Bruce Greeff wrote:
Gary Boggs wrote:

Yeh, I'm sure sorry to hear about this new price too.
I just spent
$375 for
a copy.

Question is - was/is it worth the $375 - if so be
happy. If it is not,
why did you buy it?

Gary should be happy, as you say. Free updates for
a whole year now,
instead of only 6 months.


Good luck to the guys who are getting it cheap, but
remember that you
eventually get what you pay for in software.

If this were really true, it would be easy to buy good
softwa just
pick the most expensive! But, I sit here using Netscape
7.1, a free
browser, email client, and web page composer that is
at least the equal
to IE 6 and Outlook Express, and without so many
security issues.
Mozilla 1.6 is even better, and just as free. And look
at how many
corporations use Linux.

It still costs time/money
to develop this stuff. YOu can discount to buy market
share, or be
chaeper because you live in a low cost location, but
there are limits.

Aye, and that's the rub: just where are those limits?
We won't know
until people stretch them a little, will we?

So if the price becomes too low to support - especially
in a fragmented
market, people start leaving, or stop developing...

True in general, but in this _particular_ case, can
we say $250US is too
low? With Strepla's and CU's entry into the market,
I suggest they think
not. And after CU's success with their flight display
software, I
suspect it isn't.
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Eric Greenwell
Washington State
USA