Hi Spencer, Perhaps I reacted a bit too harshly. I'm actually a happy long-time user and even a huge *fan* of ActiveState. It's just that, as a loyal customer, I feel burned. I feel "fired" in fact:
2007-03-21 $49.95 PDK Deployment Tools 7 Upgrade - SKU: pdkdt_upgrade_prod_as09 2004-04-11 $59.95 PDK Deployment Tools 6 Upgrade - SKU: pdkdt_upgrade_prod_as09 2004-01-23 $79.95 Perl Dev Kit 5 Upgrade - SKU: PDKU 2002-04-02 $79.95 Perl Dev Kit 4 Full - SKU: PDK 1999-12-09 $0.00 Perl Dev Kit 1 (Beta/Promo?) - SKU: PDK 1998-04-02 $0.00 Perl Debugger 1 (Beta/Promo?) - SKU: perlde_new_prod_as09 As you can see (they do keep good records...) no, I have not ever paid over $100 dollars for PDK up until now, and having fallen behind a version or two, I apparently don't qualify for even the $150 upgrade price! To remain an PDK user and an ActiveState customer, they're forcing me to pony up $295. Version 7: fifty dollars. Version 9: three hundred. Seriously? There is no marketing in the world that will convince me that it's six times as good, six times as bug free, or six times more fun to use. I know this is the way software is sold in Redmond, but even they know they will surely lose the share of the market for whom they increase the cost of their product 600%, right? I mean, they're surely not dumb. The only reason I can think of is that they don't want us. They increased the price that much for me because either a) I'm a statistical anomaly, such an infinitesimal percentage of their installed user base that they don't care about losing me, b) they are ignorant of the number of users for whom they've increased the cost 600% (and will now watch in horror as a large but as-yet-unpredicted number of us decade-long no-longer fiercely loyal customers, mavens, advocates and unpaid evangelists who recommend their company, product and technology all the time not only fail to buy from them again, but become bitter, disillusioned ex-customers who instead compalain to all who'll listen and strongly warn others away...) or c) they *want* us to go away. Maybe to lower the cost of supporting large numbers of casual users? I dunno. Don't care actually. Nope, just can't get there from here, sorry. It is of course entirely my fault for falling behind in my upgrades -- I'm a PDK hobbyist only -- my day job is "real" perl (as in, on *nix servers) so I don't have any pressing need to stay up to date with the latest greatest version of my little Win32 packaging tool hobby. Honestly, I wouldn't even have paid for the $150 upgrade -- $99 is pretty much my limit because perl on win32 IS just a hobby for me, not a career. I'd have to justify the expense to my wife, not my boss. A company may see a $295 piece of software as a bargain. But a wife sees a $150 non-essential piece of software as an overly expensive and self-indulgent toy (and she'd be right!). But I worry that there are probably actually legions of PDK users who, like me, cannot make the mental leap, or the financial one, especially in this economy, from $49.95 to $295, or even to $150. I wish ActiveState well, but am not likely to remain a customer at these price levels, unless I have a commercial need for it (which seems unlikely at best). And I suppose that's *exactly* the business plan they're executing: Enterprises only. No hobbyists please. And that's the sad part for me - I'll miss my PDK hobby that I can no longer afford. And I do hope the majority of PDK customer are (were) *not* like me tho I suspect they are, and will flee along with me from these prices to Stawberry (even tho its harder) and PP (even tho its slower) , causing AS to stop selling PDK altogether. I seem to remember a point in the not-too-distant past when that seemed about to happen. Jacking up the price (I mean targeting higher-end customers) is one way companies tell their product divisions that they must either perform better or get the axe. Another clever strategy they might want to try... (if any AS execs are reading this, hint, hint, hint) *might* be to LOWER the the prices to attract *more* fiercely loyal hobbyist customers like me (who keep upgrading for an entire fracking decade, because the product is so utterly cool) to say $29.95 -- AND throw in Komodo, Tcl and a year of free Firefly hosting. Tweak the product to attract even NEWER newbies, sexy it up with, oh i dunno, some more Ruby on Rails and AJAX dev tools like Eclipse has... in the hope of getting 10 (or 50 or 100) times as many customers. Going after the fewer, fatter but less loyal corporate accounts could be done simultaneously, by differentiating the products into A. The bleeding-edge but community-only support (which is cheap or free for developers and hobbyists) and B, the uuber-stable "enterprise" version with the silver, gold and platinum-plated support contracts, slick brochures, sales teams, full suite of 1000-seat licensing-compliance tools, shrink wrap packaging, fender fins and ground effects. Like RedHat Enterprise (which by the way we DO pay for at my company, a bunch of em, as do our vendors, and our clients...) and its less stable, but far cooler, red-headed stepchild (named Fedora). But of course "going all-enterprise" is the corporate thing to do I guess. And I guess that's why they are executives and I'm just a lowly ex-prosumer customer :-) -dave </diatribe length="lengthy"> Spencer Chase wrote: > I don't understand this thread. Active state still has low cost single > user licenses for both Komodo and PDK and upgrades similarly priced. > sure upgrades are now $145 instead of $100 but what hasn't increased in > cost in the past 5 years so? bought a tomato lately? > > On 8/24/2010 6:27 AM, Dennis Daupert wrote: >> You might want to have a look at Padre, The Perl IDE: >> >> http://padre.perlide.org/ >> >> There are installer binaries that will install both Strawberry >> and Padre. It's completely open source. >> >> best, >> >> /dennis >> >> ------------------------------------------------ >> Dennis Daupert, PhD >> Senior Systems Development Professional -- CSC Account >> CSC >> >> GOS | o: 1.317.298.9499 | [email protected] | www.csc.com >> >> David Kaufman wrote: >> Hi Chris, >> >> Wow -- how unbelievably sad! :-( >> >> I've upgraded my PDK licenses 4 or 5 times for under $100. I guess this >> is ActiveState's way of telling us that they're no longer interested in >> "small time" customers like us any more. >> >> Oh well, this was just the motivation I needed to dive headlong into >> Strawberry Perl and PAR. >> >> -dave >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Perl-Win32-Users mailing list >> [email protected] >> To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs > _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
