Subject: RE: [hackers-il] Joel Spolsky on Software Pricing

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:38:46 +0200

It was fun to read.

In the name of fairness, I want to point out two bits:
1. Mercury has quite a few customers that think TestDirector is way better
than Fogbugs. I'm not talking about CEOs, I'm talking about QA people.
Personally, I'm addicted to TestDirector, it is doing things no one in the
development team thought it could do, but maybe I'm just brainwashed.

2. Regarding the end of quarter trick: All competent salesmen know about
this trick, they saw tons of customers use it. It is not as impressive after
few years in the field. Not to mention that our sales force usually can't
lower the price below a certain threshold.

Anyway, articles like this make me quite glad I'm not in marketing. I have
to deal with enough Voodoo as it is.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shlomi Fish [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 9:13 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [hackers-il] Joel Spolsky on Software Pricing
> 
> 
> Check:
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
> 
> For Joel Spolsky's latest article about software pricing. It is one of his
> funniest articles yet. It is also full of things I learned in my economics
> classes in the Technion, so I really liked the reminiscence.
> 
> In case you're wondering, no - it's not too relevant to open-source
> software
> development. But it's still a lot of fun to read.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 	Shlomi Fish
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
> Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/
> 
> Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

______________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email 
______________________________________________________________________

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 22:42:41 +0200

> development team thought it could do, but maybe I'm just brainwashed.

Well, I agree that it is highly possible that TestDirector is better than 
FogBUGZ. That's not inconceivable. But Joel has a point about softwares of 
Rational/Mercury/whoever just being bought and lying on the shelf.

Actually, I heard of it from Ran Eilam:

http://search.cpan.org/~eilara/

He was my boss after he graduated from TAU and when I worked after I finished 
high school and before I enrolled into the Technion. While I spent some time 
in the Technion he has been working, and so kept track of a lot of up-to-date 
methodologies, the so-called "patterns", and other bleeding-edge stuff. In 
any case, he is a heavy advocate of Extreme Programming and gave a lecture of 
it to the Israeli Perl Mongers.

During the lecture, he mentioned the "Big Ball of Mud" syndrome that 
characterizes the code of many projects. He said, that Rational sells 
software by promising that if the teams use their product for managing the 
project it would solve all their problems. What happens is that product is 
left alone on the shelf gathering dust, because no-one can figure out how to 
use it, or why he should use it anyhow.

I agree that some of these products have some advantages over their 
Open-Source or lower-cost alternatives. The question is whether they are as 
easy to:

1. Set up and deploy.

2. Get started with.

I know ClearCase requires a lot of reading to get started with, and is not as 
straightforward to use as either BitKeeper (which costs quite a bit) or the 
open-source Subversion. You need a dedicated admin for ClearCase, while when 
deploying the BK or SVN, one of the developers (or some of them) can admin it 
for others, because they require very little active administration.

Is this the case for Test-Director, or is it much easier to set up?

> this trick, they saw tons of customers use it. It is not as impressive
> after few years in the field. Not to mention that our sales force usually
> can't lower the price below a certain threshold.

OK. It wasn't as critical a part of Joel's article anyhow.

> to deal with enough Voodoo as it is.

:-)

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---

From: "Evgeny Gesin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:25:52 -0000

At the very bottom: "Thank you for your time, and I apologize for
leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you
started reading this." :)

-- 
Evgeny Gesin
Owner
http://www.javadesk.com
http://www.alltelescopes.com