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That number doesn't surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the a
by SonicScrub 7y ago
That number doesn't surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical/aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here's the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search:
1) $35,000
2) $15,000
3) $10,000
4) $4,500
So I'm costing the company ~$65,000 per year in software licenses alone.
- baddox 7y agoDo you mean that no one else at your company uses any of those 4 softwares?
- jachee 7y agoNot if they're per-seat licenses.
- a13n 7y agoThat's per license, per employee? Or company-wide license fee? If the latter, you still need to divide by the total number of users of the product.
- leetcrew 7y agoif GP works in aerospace, those are very likely per-seat license costs.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoCompletely out of curiousity -- what software costs $35k per seat per year??
- IggleSniggle 7y agoVxWorks is about that I believe. When you reach these kinds of price tags though it's hard to evaluate them on a per seat basis, because they tend to come with built-in consultants, etc. CryEngine 3 is notoriously $1.2 million, but I believe that's a "total cost" rather than a per seat style license.
- auxym 7y agoI heard about 20k per seat for CATIA at a previous employer. 35k wouldn't surprise me if you start adding add-ons (simulation, PDM, etc).
- Serow225 7y agoLots of engineering software does. FPGA toolchains, CAD, simulation. Not uncommon.
- Silhouette 7y agoHaving worked in several related areas, but not very recently, the costs for specialist software packages were certainly much higher than people think of for basic office software, but nowhere near the scale we're talking about here. Have things truly become so crazy that five-figure annual fees for these packages are the norm? A permanent licence used to cost less per user than that! But then I suppose this is the point the article is making.
- fock 7y agoit is. And especially for SMBs, the cost was way less in the past. Imagine a small mechanical engineering company: 10 years ago they'd have 5 seats of a 5 year old AutoCAD/ProEngineer/Solidworks version, sneakily locking them in but basically no recurring costs. If a new customer needed a new version, they bought one seat for that and kept the old ones, gradually upgrading. Nowadays they pay half the single-seat cost per year because of "continouus updates" (for the UI mainly, so that they can sell trainings)
- CrazyStat 7y agoSeveral years ago my university was bragging about a $200 million donation the engineering school had received from several companies. Turned out it was just several hundred seat licenses for a bunch of commercial cad, simulation etc. software, which the companies valued at about $50k/seat. A very cheap way to donate $200 million.
- wolco 7y agoAnd to write-off $200.00 million.
- shaklee3 7y agoEnterprise optimization software costs that. Cplex, gurobi, Xpress.
- SonicScrub 7y agoThat is per seat license.
- Aeolun 7y agoBut there would have to be 5 other workers for every you. I think it’s more likely that the number is around 1 in 200 for most enterprises. And maybe closer to 1 in 1000 for all enterprises combined. Note: those numbers are pulled out of my ass.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoBut software in highly-specialized industries (i.e. needs a lot of functionality but the install base just isn't that big) has always been really expensive. This is pretty much unrelated to the SaaS boom of the past 10-15 years. I don't think specialized positions have skewed the change much towards increasing SaaS costs.
- analog31 7y agoEven for a typical office worker, based on my experience at a large company, there might be 10 to 20 enterprise apps that include: * Tracking work hours * Communicating within teams * Entering and managing yearly performance reviews * Managing IT tickets * Catching spyware, phishing, etc. * Key and click logging * Personality and other screenings for job candidates * Health insurance management * Jira being used outside of software development * Database for archiving HR announcements * Password management for the above In general, the prosperity of a business is a balance of assets and liabilities, and a software purchase is both, since it involves a cost. Managers promote purchases based on a variety of factors relative to the business and their own personal ambitions. There's no magic that makes managers so brilliant in the face of a salesman that they only make beneficial decisions, or that purchases are inherently beneficial, just because the product is software.
- pageandrew 7y agoKey and click logging?!?!?
- IggleSniggle 7y ago> * Key and click logging What kind of dystopian Corporate hellscapes have you worked in? This is totally unacceptable. I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement, no matter how benign the intentions of it's implementor. Nothing good can come of it.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 7y agoSome people do. I still blame the human for the software we have today.
- TuringNYC 7y ago>> I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement In many cases, you may not even realize it is running.
- brazzy 7y ago
- soapboxrocket 7y agoCATIA is a beast of a bill!
- ratsmack 7y agoAnd the licensing is not perpetual. Once you stop paying the annual licensing, you are legally obligated to stop sing the software.