Re: Software Vendors (And US too) - A small rant

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I opposed this unbundling - BUT - I have since changed
my mind. Turns out that once there was a price on the
product a very large number of people became interested
and usage absolutely rocketed. For years IBM didn't know
how to persuade people to use the tool - tuns out charging
for it realized what no previous method had achieved. Go
figure.

Interesting. Well, I certainly can't argue with that.

I wonder if adoption went up because the pricing made people aware of
it at all, or if the pricing invoked the "you get what you pay for"
sense of value to it. It also reinforces the idea that IBM midrange
culture is, on the whole, very different from the prevailing
open-source culture. I think by now, most folks developing on
anything else have the expectation that decent (and sometimes
outstanding) developer tools are simply going to be available for
free.

Thanks for the history lesson.

John