At 04:38 PM 11/1/01 -0800, Daniel Webster wrote: >This smug statement cuts like a knife into the >little guy trying to make a living for himself as a pcb design contractor. >Mike, I think your imagination needs to be expanded some !
While I agree, basically, with most of Mr. Webster's post, the support changes will not have as much effect on PCB design contractors assuming that Altium continues the service bureau discount that, I was told, it inherited from Accel. (I was an Accel licensee for many years, on their service bureau list, actually wrote the book on how to use Tango, which was still on their web site last time I looked, and they never told me about a service bureau discount....) As the owner of a service bureau, I am more concerned about the impact of the changes on my clients and potential clients, as well as the consequential effect on Altium's bottom line. If Altium loses, we lose. This is exactly why I believe that Altium should more actively consult its users. The interests of users and suppliers are not divergent. Software is a different business than pretty much anything that existed before; the cost per unit sold is trivial, most cost is in development or support, and with cooperative user support, necessary support costs should be minimized. (I'm including bug fixes in with development, not with support.) With software, an increase in sales volume almost certainly is an increase in profit, if the company is properly structured. That's not true for traditional manufacturing or even publishing houses. (Books traditionally sold for seven times production cost; that allowed margin for distributors and retailers plus profit for the publishers and authors. The retailer would get 40% of retail, a distributor might be paying 45 - 50% of retail, perhaps the author was getting 7%, so the publisher was left with 37% of retail, which was about 2.5 times cost. The publisher had the highest markup because the publisher had the highest risk. (It's been many years since I was in the publishing business, I don't know about current ratios.) The retail, however, got the highest proportion of the retail price. Why? Because the retailer does the most work per copy sold. In software, however, incremental cost per unit sold -- exclusive of what is called maintenance -- is perhaps 1% for a product like Protel. If we allocate $2000 of the current sales price of $8000 to maintenance, including the initial handholding of the user, That still leaves $6000 per copy as the real retail price of the software itself, the shrinkwrap package, of which $5920 or so is gross margin. That is a 98.7% gross margin. So software profits are far more sensitive to increases in volume than are traditional publishing profits. Obviously, a certain volume is necessary to meet the relatively high development costs, but my point is that sales beyond that point are almost pure gravy. Now, imagine the situation if a publisher demands that all sales be directly through the publisher. The accountants who proposed this simply looked at converting their roughly 60% margin to about 85%, by eliminating the middlemen. We'll be rolling in dough, they think. But their sales would plummet. Not only would they need to develop additional sales staff, the sales staff would not be in close contact with the buyers, as are bookstores. When I want to buy a book, I think of going to a bookstore (and Amazon is a discount bookstore), not to the publisher. When I buy software I most commonly go to a software seller, only with a few packages do I think of the software company. Protel had VARs in most markets, and developed its business in this way. With engineering software, if the company is going to sell the software directly, it really needs a highly-developed -- read expensive -- sales force, to frequently visit or contact potential buyers. Essentially such a company is opening its own store. Many immature industries begin this way. Mature industries for the most part do not, because internal sales organizations tend to be less efficient than do organizations close to the customers. Even while Protel U.S.A. did not have VARs here, officially, there was a policy of 50% discount for purchase of ten licenses for resale, I was told by Protel salespeople. So the new policy of 50% discount for service bureaus really represented, as a change, only an allowance of a wholesale discount for less than 10 copies; justified by the critical position of service bureaus in their contacts with clients. I may have been the only service bureau to notice the sales opportunity, but that would not have remained the situation. Selling a few copies per year, which just about any Protel service bureau could do, could have added perhaps $10,000 or more to net profit even selling at a discount, which for a small bureau is very significant. And Protel would be making a high margin, still, on every one of those sales, without *any* added risk. Plus they would then get all the upgrade or maintenance charges. Alternatively, the service bureaus could have sold at full price, possibly including a certain amount of service as value added. Either way the bureau essentially would be using its existing and developing contacts, the same contacts necessary for their regular business. As I wrote before, I thought it was a brilliant move. But, instead, I was mistaken, that was not the policy, it was only Protel USA's misunderstanding, their assumption that the service bureau licenses were the same as all other licenses, a reasonable assumption given that the exact same license language was included. It was still a helpful move, for service bureaus, but not one that had much potential for expanded sales. Altium is now moving away from methods and policies that were highly successful for it. That's a dangerous business. It has apparently pulled the plug on its last VARs. If that is done without proper consideration for the VAR's investment in unrealized sales, in developed contacts, it's unethical. That too worries me. The big changes are new, and Protel, in the past, backed away from some announcements based on user response. I hope they are listening. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abdulrahman Lomax Easthampton, Massachusetts USA * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
