4 ms·

They do alienate customers, and for a lot of companies this is on purpose. Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's enterprise products on their website

They do alienate customers, and for a lot of companies this is on purpose. Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's enterprise products on their website - you won't - their products aren't designed for the casual browser, they are designed for directors who have budgets in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars range (where strangely the price ends up pretty similar to the budget). This is the type of person they want as a customer, and so all their marketing and sales process targets this type of person. It's not worth it for them to target the small fish, so they purposely push this type of customer away. I do hate when small companies do it though. I'm looking for a new AC unit and so few dealers will just give me a price straight away. I just want to enter my credit card and have it delivered.

enraged_camel 11y ago
You're right about the target audience, but wrong about the reason. They don't quote a price because the cost of the product they sell makes up only a small percentage of the overall cost. The vast majority comes from consulting and product customization, which is billable by the hour. And since you don't know the prospect's exact need during the initial engagement, providing pricing would be silly. Source: I work in that exact market. When a prospect asks for a price up front, they basically fail lead qualification. As the saying goes, if you have to ask how much it is, you ain't the target audience.
- estefan 11y ago
  It's also because it releases less information into the public domain about how the industry works. Less information = greater competitive advantage. It's harder for new entrants to determine 'reasonable' pricing and to position their offerings.
tajen 11y ago
I would argue that IBM's business is selling golf courses and Orlando software-and-wine conferences to CEOs, for having witnessed it, because honestly, which sysadmin would accept to run such horrible pieces of software (IBM Rational Suite or IBM FileNet), let alone... pay for it, really? It looks like nothing more than corruption of officers on fiduciary duty. Secret pricing is exactly how they conduct that business: With no public price, employees can't challenge IBM's consultants to provide the value they're charged for. If all from Atlassian to SpaceX publish their pricing, any other behaviour should trigger a SEC investigation.
- dvtv75 11y ago
  There's also the rather odd "Sign up to see prices." I did sign up to see what Autodesk Maya cost in my country's currency. At the time, in $US is was $3,995 for a single seat. In my country, it was around $US12000. I did what any good person with a goodly amount of cash in the bank would do - I said "$#@! it," and bought a house instead.
  - AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
    You can get a house for $12k?
- bpchaps 11y ago
  Other smaller companies act like this, too. Was invited to a steak lunch for automic's UC4 (job scheduling) at a fancy dinner far away from anything relevant and at no point, during a two hour talk, was anything of substance actually said. They were trying to sell us UC4 (we already owned it, ffs) yet they didn't even show us the damn interface! Everything was fluff upon fluff upon fluff. And the execs - wearing some of the most expensive suits and watches I've ever seen - friggin' loved it. The best part is that they brought in McDonald's UC4 engineer to talk about how good it was. When we asked him how they automated its deployment and where they got their init scripts from, since UC4 didn't include any (wtf), his answer was that it was basically his full time job to deploy it by hand, since he didn't know how to automate anything. Somehow he turned his lack of skill and McDonald's apparent lack of good tech leadership into a positive thing - which the execs also loved. These are the kinds of people making large, absurdly expensive software decisions for multi, multi billion dollar companies. I have nightmares of trying to figure out their database schema. 2-6ish letter German acronyms for table names.... Their wiki gives a good impression of their character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic
  - geon 11y ago
    They use a large, expensive platform for automation, and they don't know how to automate?
gtufano 11y ago
Or try with Microsoft... if you're in Italy it's impossible to know (as a final user) any price for anything else than a single copy of Office or Windows...
rlonstein 11y ago
> Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's > enterprise products on their website Not to defend these two but in some cases for IBM you will, if you know the incantation and buzzwords, find the price. For example WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ can be looked up because IBM deals in PVU's (processor value unit) and bundled licenses that include support. They do provide a PVU calculator. Of course, you'll have to register to get more information or download a demo. It's frustrating but not impossible.
maxxxxx 11y ago
With Oracle and IBM you often can't even figure out what the damn thing does. I have had several occasions where senior management told me to check out that really cool technology they saw. I went to the website and tried to find out what it does and couldn't figure it out.
- groovy2shoes 11y ago
  Not even just Oracle and IBM. When I was considering the offer from my current employer, I was perusing their Web site to try to find out about the product I would be working on. I read a couple of whitepapers and such, and for the life of me couldn't figure it out (though in this case, I suspect someone with more domain knowledge than I had might find the whitepapers sensical).
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
> It's not worth it for them to target the small fish Actually they do target the small fish, that's why they won't publish prices. The idea here is that $big_co may pay $5m for $software, but $small_co will get the near equivalent for $100,000. $big_co doesn't want to feel it got ripped off, so secretive pricing all around. Also, this pricing allows for a lot of negotiation, volume pricing, and "we'll beat the competition" tactics. Now the competition needs to also engage in secretive pricing to stay competitive.

enraged_camel 11y ago

You're right about the target audience, but wrong about the reason. They don't quote a price because the cost of the product they sell makes up only a small percentage of the overall cost. The vast majority comes from consulting and product customization, which is billable by the hour. And since you don't know the prospect's exact need during the initial engagement, providing pricing would be silly. Source: I work in that exact market. When a prospect asks for a price up front, they basically fail lead qualification. As the saying goes, if you have to ask how much it is, you ain't the target audience.

estefan 11y ago
It's also because it releases less information into the public domain about how the industry works. Less information = greater competitive advantage. It's harder for new entrants to determine 'reasonable' pricing and to position their offerings.

tajen 11y ago

I would argue that IBM's business is selling golf courses and Orlando software-and-wine conferences to CEOs, for having witnessed it, because honestly, which sysadmin would accept to run such horrible pieces of software (IBM Rational Suite or IBM FileNet), let alone... pay for it, really? It looks like nothing more than corruption of officers on fiduciary duty. Secret pricing is exactly how they conduct that business: With no public price, employees can't challenge IBM's consultants to provide the value they're charged for. If all from Atlassian to SpaceX publish their pricing, any other behaviour should trigger a SEC investigation.

dvtv75 11y ago
There's also the rather odd "Sign up to see prices." I did sign up to see what Autodesk Maya cost in my country's currency. At the time, in $US is was $3,995 for a single seat. In my country, it was around $US12000. I did what any good person with a goodly amount of cash in the bank would do - I said "$#@! it," and bought a house instead.
- AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
  You can get a house for $12k?
bpchaps 11y ago
Other smaller companies act like this, too. Was invited to a steak lunch for automic's UC4 (job scheduling) at a fancy dinner far away from anything relevant and at no point, during a two hour talk, was anything of substance actually said. They were trying to sell us UC4 (we already owned it, ffs) yet they didn't even show us the damn interface! Everything was fluff upon fluff upon fluff. And the execs - wearing some of the most expensive suits and watches I've ever seen - friggin' loved it. The best part is that they brought in McDonald's UC4 engineer to talk about how good it was. When we asked him how they automated its deployment and where they got their init scripts from, since UC4 didn't include any (wtf), his answer was that it was basically his full time job to deploy it by hand, since he didn't know how to automate anything. Somehow he turned his lack of skill and McDonald's apparent lack of good tech leadership into a positive thing - which the execs also loved. These are the kinds of people making large, absurdly expensive software decisions for multi, multi billion dollar companies. I have nightmares of trying to figure out their database schema. 2-6ish letter German acronyms for table names.... Their wiki gives a good impression of their character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automic
- geon 11y ago
  They use a large, expensive platform for automation, and they don't know how to automate?

gtufano 11y ago

Or try with Microsoft... if you're in Italy it's impossible to know (as a final user) any price for anything else than a single copy of Office or Windows...

rlonstein 11y ago

> Try finding a price for one of Oracle's or IBM's > enterprise products on their website Not to defend these two but in some cases for IBM you will, if you know the incantation and buzzwords, find the price. For example WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ can be looked up because IBM deals in PVU's (processor value unit) and bundled licenses that include support. They do provide a PVU calculator. Of course, you'll have to register to get more information or download a demo. It's frustrating but not impossible.

maxxxxx 11y ago

With Oracle and IBM you often can't even figure out what the damn thing does. I have had several occasions where senior management told me to check out that really cool technology they saw. I went to the website and tried to find out what it does and couldn't figure it out.

groovy2shoes 11y ago
Not even just Oracle and IBM. When I was considering the offer from my current employer, I was perusing their Web site to try to find out about the product I would be working on. I read a couple of whitepapers and such, and for the life of me couldn't figure it out (though in this case, I suspect someone with more domain knowledge than I had might find the whitepapers sensical).

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

> It's not worth it for them to target the small fish Actually they do target the small fish, that's why they won't publish prices. The idea here is that $big_co may pay $5m for $software, but $small_co will get the near equivalent for $100,000. $big_co doesn't want to feel it got ripped off, so secretive pricing all around. Also, this pricing allows for a lot of negotiation, volume pricing, and "we'll beat the competition" tactics. Now the competition needs to also engage in secretive pricing to stay competitive.