7 ms·

Open source software only comes in one edition: awesome.

75 points by fogus 17y ago

sunir 17y ago
That's hardly the case. In Jeff's words, I dare you, double dog dare you to count the number of Linux distributions. Each version satisfies a different customer target, same as each version of Basecamp satisfies a different type of company.
- whughes 17y ago
  Let's just look at the list of Ubuntu editions, since that's comparable directly to Windows or Mac OS X. Ubuntu Kubuntu Edubuntu Xubuntu Lubuntu Fluxbuntu Mythbuntu Ubuntu JeOS Ubuntu MID Ubuntu Netbook Remix Ubuntu Studio
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeryan 17y ago
    But AFAIK they all cost the same price?
    - statictype 17y ago
      Well, I think the point of the article was not that segmenting made the product more expensive, but rather, you now have to sit down and spend some time carefully deciding which version you need.
  - graemep 17y ago
    1) Not all those are official editions. 2) None have features deliberately turned off. 3) Most , if not all, differ only in what optional components are installed by default, If you change your mind you can simply add whatever your missing - you can install Ubuntu, then add the bits that make it Kubuntu, then add Xubuntu etc.
- bad_user 17y ago
  The point is that features in a Linux distribution are not cut out because of "consumer surplus". They are customized to make certain tasks easier for some people ... but the various distributions don't have artificial limitations. Say you are tired of KDE in Kubuntu, you just "apt-get install gnome-desktop". You are tired of Apache, then "apt-get install lighttpd". Defaults are not limitations. And seriously, most people pick one distribution and stick with it. I'm using Debian for everything ... work servers, laptop, home station. OK, to be honest the home station has Ubuntu on it, but that's still 95% Debian. And, if there's a feature missing (like hardware limitations), you are most likely to fix it with a kernel upgrade, or with a patch someone on the mailing list gives you for free.
  - mcantor 17y ago
    I strongly agree... I think the OP of this threads' contention is not in the same spirit as Mr. Atwood's. I think this Coding Horror post was lamenting the existence / necessity of the "pricing tiers" common in commercial software. Linux distributions, and even versions of Ubuntu itself, are not organized in a "tier" layout, where Tier N has X more features than Tier N - 1, or Tier N's features have X more capacity. Linux distros and Ubuntu versions, on the other hand, are organized horizontally: They don't have better features (per se), but different features.
  - omail 17y ago
    Not only that, if you select the wrong edition, switching to the correct edition costs less with Linux than with Windows.
drcode 17y ago
can we please stop using the word "awesome" already? :)
- mmc 17y ago
  I say, pick your battles. "fail" as a noun rankles far more. Killing "(epic) fail" would be truly awesome. I'd even be willing to bring back "tubular" in trade.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    What if we change the slang to "flail", which is at least both a noun and a verb?
- mcantor 17y ago
  I upvoted you because we really should stop, but I still can't bring myself to remove "awesome" from my vocabulary. Modern slang has made it the apotheosis of coolness; its appeal is irresistible to me. In my own defense, whenever I say "This terrifying thunderstorm is awesome," I mean it in the classic sense as well as the colloquial. :->
- sepa 17y ago
  atwood really likes that word
- jussij 17y ago
  What an awesome idea ;)
MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
Heck, thanks to github, OSS spawns a new "edition" as fast as someone can click the fork button. Not that I'm complaining! It's nice to be able to find a project abandoned by the original dev, but picked up by a 1/2 dozen other people.
raintrees 17y ago
Applying the googlenomics concept I just read in Wired, aren't auctions the next step in pricing's natural selection process?
- sfg 17y ago
  Can auctions function for goods that are not (practically) scarce?
  - raintrees 17y ago
    I was thinking of an auction over a specific time period to set price levels. I think it would also be well to have it re-run/revisited later, to see if the same price levels still apply (see previous iPhone app charge change articles).
CodeMage 17y ago
As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation. Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)? Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.
- bad_user 17y ago
  > but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself. Consequence or not, how can it not be an advantage?
  - CodeMage 17y ago
    Because market segmentation in itself, as a concept, is not a disadvantage, which means that lack of it is not an advantage in itself. Like I said, market segmentation in software does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Consider a hypothetical text editor that comes in two editions. The "basic" edition has features like syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, etc. The "advanced" edition has a feature that allows you to open and save files not just locally, but also via SFTP. When it was first written, the editor didn't have the SFTP feature, the author developed it because there were some users who asked for it; they weren't the majority, but the author thought the idea was nice. Instead of incorporating that feature into the one and only edition, the author decided to offer two editions: a cheaper "basic" and a more expensive "advanced" edition. It was the author's idea of placing value on the effort involved in writing the SFTP feature. The majority of users can go on happily using the "basic" edition without paying extra for it, while those who really want SFTP can pay for it. One way of looking at this market segmentation is to say that the author was greedy and imposed an artificial limitation on one of the editions in his product. Another way of looking at it is to say that the author offers two products that satisfy different needs at different costs. If we were talking about two products from two different authors, we would be comparing their features and prices quite naturally, without complaining about market segmentation. However, when you're offering exactly the same product, with no differences, for two different prices, then you're just being greedy and taking advantage of your customers (which is something commonplace nowadays and most people, myself included, just accept it). Close to that is the situation in which you slap a truly artificial restriction on a cheaper edition of your product, not through a lack of feature, but through a deliberate crippling of that feature (e.g. the five-dollar edition can open only up to 3 files). The exception, of course, is a crippled free edition which allows potential customers to try your product before deciding whether to buy it. In that case, you're just being annoying ;) That, in summary, is why I believe that market segmentation is an advantage, within certain ethical bounds.
sutro 17y ago
Maybe the awesome foundation will give Jeff an awesome grant to upgrade his windows server to awesome edition. Isn't it an awesome day on HN?
sho 17y ago
For someone who started computing on his father's Osborne 1, hearing people casually mention that they upgraded their server to 48GB induces something like vertigo. A 768,000 fold increase in main memory. Christ we've come a long way.
- neilc 17y ago
  And to think, hard drive seek latency has only improved by 2x or 3x.
  - sho 17y ago
    The Osborne 1 didn't even have an HDD! You think HDs are slow, try 5 1/4" floppies for latency. Anyway, SSDs soon. I will not be sorry to see the back of spinning magnetic media of any stripe.
    - 10ren 17y ago
      x3,000,000 for me (ZX81 with 16 K RAM pack - but if I'd stuck with the standard 1K, it would be... x48,000,000).
      - 10ren 17y ago
        One version of Moore's Law predicts x1000 increase in 15 years (x2 every 1.5 years; 2^10 = 1024). 48GB isn't standard today. The ordinary amount in an average desktop PC is about 2GB. Therefore, in 15 years (2024), we can expect ordinary, standard desktop PC to have 2TB RAM.
anigbrowl 17y ago
So why is Jeff Atwood using Windows instead of Linux to run his database server? Not complaining, but presumably it delivers something that the open-source alternative doesn't.
- mattmcknight 17y ago
  He uses SQL Server, of course. The root cause is that Joel used to work for Microsoft. Awesome.
  - dmpayton 17y ago
    Not just that, but Jeff is a .Net programmer (IIRC, S.O. is written in C#).
    - smokinn 17y ago
      And he spent a good chunk of his career as an evangelist for a Microsoft shop. (Not Microsoft itself but a "Microsoft partner")
TravisLS 17y ago
This post does a very effective job of highlighting rule #1 of market segmentation: every customer should be almost immediately sure which segment they fit in. For example: is this computer for business or personal use? do you need the "super-duper full-lenth CGI movie" version, the "regular everyday use" version, or the "i only browse the internet" version? You just can't push it much further than that. Vista failed miserably on this front, which surely accounted for more than a trivial decline in upgrade sales.
aneesh 17y ago
> "Already, I'm confused. Which one of these versions allows me to use all 48 GB of my server's memory? ... Just try to make sense of it all. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you! " Dare accepted. It's actually right there, 1 click away from the page Jeff linked to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-spe... The answer to his question is Enterprise, Datacenter, and HPC.
10ren 17y ago
A company needing over 32GB of server RAM is getting more value from it than if they only needed 1-4GB RAM. It's a measure of customer value created. I suspect Jeff is upset mainly because he didn't know. 32GB is an arbitrary seeming boundary, that wasn't signaled clearly (enough to him). He breathed to life a plan to live his ideal of RAM-cheap, coder-dear. He went to the trouble to buy RAM. And to pay for it. And to install it... All the while expecting that it would just work. He feels ripped off, tripped up, cheated, deceived and abused. He didn't get what he paid for (specifically: what he thought he was paying for). This a problem of expectation-management. And Jeff is quite right to blame marketing. And he's right to punish them. As his article has. Go Jeff!
- 10ren 17y ago
  Clarification I think my comment seems a bit sarcastic, but it wasn't meant to be. I think marketing should be as up front and clear as possible about what customers are getting, instead of hiding it. Publicity (like Jeff's response) is one of the few pressures on them to do so.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Clarification 2: I, like Jeff, also have a pricing matrix for my product. Sometimes people don't read it properly and are confused - although I'm nice about it, I tend to feel unsympathetic. This is because it's hard for me to really see from someone else's point of view, since we only actually ever see from our own... It reminds me of the founder/maintainer of a very successful programmer's website who said, "People will not read what you write [for a web-app GUI], not matter what you write, or how you write it". His frustration was maxed out. It occurred to me that one solution is to only provide buttons (i.e. actions) for what you actually want users to do. This constrains their choices to only valid ones. This amounts to a kind of "wizard" - but they've been very successful, so this isn't a bad thing. It also obeys the "don't make me think!" imperative, provided the GUI is designed-well... It also helps if the pricing options are also designed well. In fact, I believe it is worth sacrificing profit/benefit to the customer (or other efficiencies) if by doing so, you can make the choices clearer and simpler for the customer (eg. clarity can come from obvious patterns in the pricing, even if they totally don't fit the true demographics). To apply this to successfully communicating the limits of each pricing option, where "successfully" means that the customer hears what you say, you could have a button for each limit. By consciously selecting the limit, the user would know what it is. Unfortunately, this can lead to frustrating backtracking when one choice constrains other choices in unexpected ways. One can muck around with different orderings of the choices, but I think that ultimately, the only real solution is to make the options match what the user would expect. That is, change your pricing model to accord with what the user expects. Not vice versa. This is a kind of "pricing positioning", where the goal isn't to sell more, but to communicate better, by associating your product with a category, and then following the standard pricing approaches for that category - whether they suit you or not. The purpose is to communicate, and doing it well makes everyone happier. For me, it's intrinsically valuable: successful communication is a joy in itself; miscommunication is suffering.
nopassrecover 17y ago
This is like complaining that your student version has the artificial limitation that you can't use it for commercial use. If you needed to use more than 32GB of ram, something only heavy duty commercial servers would need, then you buy the heavy duty commercial version of Windows Server. You have paid a price before that was in essence subsidised by the higher-end commercial users - now you are one of them (Congratulations!) and get to "subsidise" standard versions for the rest of us. It's the same theory as scaled taxation (which is a different argument as government has separate responsibilities than business) - think of yourself as in the highest earning bracket now.
samuel 17y ago
That's nothing. When you want extra processor resources on an IBM iSeries, you only need to enter some code (after paying IBM big €€), and vóilá, your server will use some extra cores that were always there. I have heard Sun does the same, and probably others too. All in all, it isn't that bad. At least there's an easy upgrade path. Probably you can't do that with Windows Server.
j_baker 17y ago
> If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we don't use software that costs money here, but I'd almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again. The grass is always greener on the other side isn't it? Don't get me wrong, FOSS has upsides, but segmentation isn't one of them. If time really is the cost rather than the cost of the software, FOSS isn't any better. The only difference is that nobody is artificially segmenting the market. The market artificially segments itself. Think about it: do you use Debian? Fedora? CentOS? Or do you go with someone you can buy a support contract for like Red Hat or Novell or SuSE? Or would you rather go for a BSD flavor of nix? OpenSolaris seems to also be gaining popularity; do you choose it? And once you get that sorted out, what webserver do you choose? Apache? Lighttpd? Nginx? Comanche? Are you doing Python? Then you also should consider CherryPy. So, to summarize... sometimes I'd be willing to pay money to know that no matter what* edition I choose, I'm still buying Windows.
yason 17y ago
Segmentation is a good thing also from the consumer/buyer viewpoint but "limitations" like this max O/S memory limit are absolutely spinelessly crippled blatant rip-offs, and have no correlation with the actual work required to make those features. The same goes for the stupid restriction of the maximum of ten simultaneous network connections (can't remember whether it was inbound or both?) imposed in some basic Windows (Home? Professional? vs. Server?) editions. An operating system shouldn't limit the capabilities of available hardware. They could reasonably decide to not support some heavy-duty server hardware at all except in the server edition. Or they could give the server edition a better I/O scheduler (that can handle large loads) or something to make it a must if you want to use Windows on a server. But if I have a network adapter in my box I expect to be able to max it out in all imaginable ways regardless of the O/S "edition". Or use as much memory as I can physically fit in my box.

75 points by fogus 17y ago

sunir 17y ago

That's hardly the case. In Jeff's words, I dare you, double dog dare you to count the number of Linux distributions. Each version satisfies a different customer target, same as each version of Basecamp satisfies a different type of company.

whughes 17y ago
Let's just look at the list of Ubuntu editions, since that's comparable directly to Windows or Mac OS X. Ubuntu Kubuntu Edubuntu Xubuntu Lubuntu Fluxbuntu Mythbuntu Ubuntu JeOS Ubuntu MID Ubuntu Netbook Remix Ubuntu Studio
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeryan 17y ago
  But AFAIK they all cost the same price?
  - statictype 17y ago
    Well, I think the point of the article was not that segmenting made the product more expensive, but rather, you now have to sit down and spend some time carefully deciding which version you need.
- graemep 17y ago
  1) Not all those are official editions. 2) None have features deliberately turned off. 3) Most , if not all, differ only in what optional components are installed by default, If you change your mind you can simply add whatever your missing - you can install Ubuntu, then add the bits that make it Kubuntu, then add Xubuntu etc.
bad_user 17y ago
The point is that features in a Linux distribution are not cut out because of "consumer surplus". They are customized to make certain tasks easier for some people ... but the various distributions don't have artificial limitations. Say you are tired of KDE in Kubuntu, you just "apt-get install gnome-desktop". You are tired of Apache, then "apt-get install lighttpd". Defaults are not limitations. And seriously, most people pick one distribution and stick with it. I'm using Debian for everything ... work servers, laptop, home station. OK, to be honest the home station has Ubuntu on it, but that's still 95% Debian. And, if there's a feature missing (like hardware limitations), you are most likely to fix it with a kernel upgrade, or with a patch someone on the mailing list gives you for free.
- mcantor 17y ago
  I strongly agree... I think the OP of this threads' contention is not in the same spirit as Mr. Atwood's. I think this Coding Horror post was lamenting the existence / necessity of the "pricing tiers" common in commercial software. Linux distributions, and even versions of Ubuntu itself, are not organized in a "tier" layout, where Tier N has X more features than Tier N - 1, or Tier N's features have X more capacity. Linux distros and Ubuntu versions, on the other hand, are organized horizontally: They don't have better features (per se), but different features.
- omail 17y ago
  Not only that, if you select the wrong edition, switching to the correct edition costs less with Linux than with Windows.

drcode 17y ago

can we please stop using the word "awesome" already? :)

mmc 17y ago
I say, pick your battles. "fail" as a noun rankles far more. Killing "(epic) fail" would be truly awesome. I'd even be willing to bring back "tubular" in trade.
- swolchok 17y ago
  What if we change the slang to "flail", which is at least both a noun and a verb?
mcantor 17y ago
I upvoted you because we really should stop, but I still can't bring myself to remove "awesome" from my vocabulary. Modern slang has made it the apotheosis of coolness; its appeal is irresistible to me. In my own defense, whenever I say "This terrifying thunderstorm is awesome," I mean it in the classic sense as well as the colloquial. :->
sepa 17y ago
atwood really likes that word
jussij 17y ago
What an awesome idea ;)

MicahWedemeyer 17y ago

Heck, thanks to github, OSS spawns a new "edition" as fast as someone can click the fork button. Not that I'm complaining! It's nice to be able to find a project abandoned by the original dev, but picked up by a 1/2 dozen other people.

raintrees 17y ago

Applying the googlenomics concept I just read in Wired, aren't auctions the next step in pricing's natural selection process?

sfg 17y ago
Can auctions function for goods that are not (practically) scarce?
- raintrees 17y ago
  I was thinking of an auction over a specific time period to set price levels. I think it would also be well to have it re-run/revisited later, to see if the same price levels still apply (see previous iPhone app charge change articles).

CodeMage 17y ago

As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation. Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)? Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.

bad_user 17y ago
> but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself. Consequence or not, how can it not be an advantage?
- CodeMage 17y ago
  Because market segmentation in itself, as a concept, is not a disadvantage, which means that lack of it is not an advantage in itself. Like I said, market segmentation in software does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Consider a hypothetical text editor that comes in two editions. The "basic" edition has features like syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, etc. The "advanced" edition has a feature that allows you to open and save files not just locally, but also via SFTP. When it was first written, the editor didn't have the SFTP feature, the author developed it because there were some users who asked for it; they weren't the majority, but the author thought the idea was nice. Instead of incorporating that feature into the one and only edition, the author decided to offer two editions: a cheaper "basic" and a more expensive "advanced" edition. It was the author's idea of placing value on the effort involved in writing the SFTP feature. The majority of users can go on happily using the "basic" edition without paying extra for it, while those who really want SFTP can pay for it. One way of looking at this market segmentation is to say that the author was greedy and imposed an artificial limitation on one of the editions in his product. Another way of looking at it is to say that the author offers two products that satisfy different needs at different costs. If we were talking about two products from two different authors, we would be comparing their features and prices quite naturally, without complaining about market segmentation. However, when you're offering exactly the same product, with no differences, for two different prices, then you're just being greedy and taking advantage of your customers (which is something commonplace nowadays and most people, myself included, just accept it). Close to that is the situation in which you slap a truly artificial restriction on a cheaper edition of your product, not through a lack of feature, but through a deliberate crippling of that feature (e.g. the five-dollar edition can open only up to 3 files). The exception, of course, is a crippled free edition which allows potential customers to try your product before deciding whether to buy it. In that case, you're just being annoying ;) That, in summary, is why I believe that market segmentation is an advantage, within certain ethical bounds.

sutro 17y ago

Maybe the awesome foundation will give Jeff an awesome grant to upgrade his windows server to awesome edition. Isn't it an awesome day on HN?

sho 17y ago

For someone who started computing on his father's Osborne 1, hearing people casually mention that they upgraded their server to 48GB induces something like vertigo. A 768,000 fold increase in main memory. Christ we've come a long way.

neilc 17y ago
And to think, hard drive seek latency has only improved by 2x or 3x.
- sho 17y ago
  The Osborne 1 didn't even have an HDD! You think HDs are slow, try 5 1/4" floppies for latency. Anyway, SSDs soon. I will not be sorry to see the back of spinning magnetic media of any stripe.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    x3,000,000 for me (ZX81 with 16 K RAM pack - but if I'd stuck with the standard 1K, it would be... x48,000,000).
    - 10ren 17y ago
      One version of Moore's Law predicts x1000 increase in 15 years (x2 every 1.5 years; 2^10 = 1024). 48GB isn't standard today. The ordinary amount in an average desktop PC is about 2GB. Therefore, in 15 years (2024), we can expect ordinary, standard desktop PC to have 2TB RAM.

anigbrowl 17y ago

So why is Jeff Atwood using Windows instead of Linux to run his database server? Not complaining, but presumably it delivers something that the open-source alternative doesn't.

mattmcknight 17y ago
He uses SQL Server, of course. The root cause is that Joel used to work for Microsoft. Awesome.
- dmpayton 17y ago
  Not just that, but Jeff is a .Net programmer (IIRC, S.O. is written in C#).
  - smokinn 17y ago
    And he spent a good chunk of his career as an evangelist for a Microsoft shop. (Not Microsoft itself but a "Microsoft partner")

TravisLS 17y ago

This post does a very effective job of highlighting rule #1 of market segmentation: every customer should be almost immediately sure which segment they fit in. For example: is this computer for business or personal use? do you need the "super-duper full-lenth CGI movie" version, the "regular everyday use" version, or the "i only browse the internet" version? You just can't push it much further than that. Vista failed miserably on this front, which surely accounted for more than a trivial decline in upgrade sales.

aneesh 17y ago

> "Already, I'm confused. Which one of these versions allows me to use all 48 GB of my server's memory? ... Just try to make sense of it all. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you! " Dare accepted. It's actually right there, 1 click away from the page Jeff linked to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-spe... The answer to his question is Enterprise, Datacenter, and HPC.

10ren 17y ago

A company needing over 32GB of server RAM is getting more value from it than if they only needed 1-4GB RAM. It's a measure of customer value created. I suspect Jeff is upset mainly because he didn't know. 32GB is an arbitrary seeming boundary, that wasn't signaled clearly (enough to him). He breathed to life a plan to live his ideal of RAM-cheap, coder-dear. He went to the trouble to buy RAM. And to pay for it. And to install it... All the while expecting that it would just work. He feels ripped off, tripped up, cheated, deceived and abused. He didn't get what he paid for (specifically: what he thought he was paying for). This a problem of expectation-management. And Jeff is quite right to blame marketing. And he's right to punish them. As his article has. Go Jeff!

10ren 17y ago
Clarification I think my comment seems a bit sarcastic, but it wasn't meant to be. I think marketing should be as up front and clear as possible about what customers are getting, instead of hiding it. Publicity (like Jeff's response) is one of the few pressures on them to do so.
- 10ren 17y ago
  Clarification 2: I, like Jeff, also have a pricing matrix for my product. Sometimes people don't read it properly and are confused - although I'm nice about it, I tend to feel unsympathetic. This is because it's hard for me to really see from someone else's point of view, since we only actually ever see from our own... It reminds me of the founder/maintainer of a very successful programmer's website who said, "People will not read what you write [for a web-app GUI], not matter what you write, or how you write it". His frustration was maxed out. It occurred to me that one solution is to only provide buttons (i.e. actions) for what you actually want users to do. This constrains their choices to only valid ones. This amounts to a kind of "wizard" - but they've been very successful, so this isn't a bad thing. It also obeys the "don't make me think!" imperative, provided the GUI is designed-well... It also helps if the pricing options are also designed well. In fact, I believe it is worth sacrificing profit/benefit to the customer (or other efficiencies) if by doing so, you can make the choices clearer and simpler for the customer (eg. clarity can come from obvious patterns in the pricing, even if they totally don't fit the true demographics). To apply this to successfully communicating the limits of each pricing option, where "successfully" means that the customer hears what you say, you could have a button for each limit. By consciously selecting the limit, the user would know what it is. Unfortunately, this can lead to frustrating backtracking when one choice constrains other choices in unexpected ways. One can muck around with different orderings of the choices, but I think that ultimately, the only real solution is to make the options match what the user would expect. That is, change your pricing model to accord with what the user expects. Not vice versa. This is a kind of "pricing positioning", where the goal isn't to sell more, but to communicate better, by associating your product with a category, and then following the standard pricing approaches for that category - whether they suit you or not. The purpose is to communicate, and doing it well makes everyone happier. For me, it's intrinsically valuable: successful communication is a joy in itself; miscommunication is suffering.

nopassrecover 17y ago

This is like complaining that your student version has the artificial limitation that you can't use it for commercial use. If you needed to use more than 32GB of ram, something only heavy duty commercial servers would need, then you buy the heavy duty commercial version of Windows Server. You have paid a price before that was in essence subsidised by the higher-end commercial users - now you are one of them (Congratulations!) and get to "subsidise" standard versions for the rest of us. It's the same theory as scaled taxation (which is a different argument as government has separate responsibilities than business) - think of yourself as in the highest earning bracket now.

samuel 17y ago

That's nothing. When you want extra processor resources on an IBM iSeries, you only need to enter some code (after paying IBM big €€), and vóilá, your server will use some extra cores that were always there. I have heard Sun does the same, and probably others too. All in all, it isn't that bad. At least there's an easy upgrade path. Probably you can't do that with Windows Server.

j_baker 17y ago

> If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we don't use software that costs money here, but I'd almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again. The grass is always greener on the other side isn't it? Don't get me wrong, FOSS has upsides, but segmentation isn't one of them. If time really is the cost rather than the cost of the software, FOSS isn't any better. The only difference is that nobody is artificially segmenting the market. The market artificially segments itself. Think about it: do you use Debian? Fedora? CentOS? Or do you go with someone you can buy a support contract for like Red Hat or Novell or SuSE? Or would you rather go for a BSD flavor of nix? OpenSolaris seems to also be gaining popularity; do you choose it? And once you get that sorted out, what webserver do you choose? Apache? Lighttpd? Nginx? Comanche? Are you doing Python? Then you also should consider CherryPy. So, to summarize... sometimes I'd be willing to pay money to know that no matter what* edition I choose, I'm still buying Windows.

yason 17y ago

Segmentation is a good thing also from the consumer/buyer viewpoint but "limitations" like this max O/S memory limit are absolutely spinelessly crippled blatant rip-offs, and have no correlation with the actual work required to make those features. The same goes for the stupid restriction of the maximum of ten simultaneous network connections (can't remember whether it was inbound or both?) imposed in some basic Windows (Home? Professional? vs. Server?) editions. An operating system shouldn't limit the capabilities of available hardware. They could reasonably decide to not support some heavy-duty server hardware at all except in the server edition. Or they could give the server edition a better I/O scheduler (that can handle large loads) or something to make it a must if you want to use Windows on a server. But if I have a network adapter in my box I expect to be able to max it out in all imaginable ways regardless of the O/S "edition". Or use as much memory as I can physically fit in my box.