I learned back in 98+ days that not all SPs or releases are production
ready. What I had to put up with back then pales with today's
experience. I would say that learning to differentiate problems with
the software from problems with the user is what has made us stronger,
more savvy users (as opposed to stronger, more savvy designers and
engineers).
With my scheme and SW current very early release the software should
be stable about the end of the year. Couple that with the usual end of
year software specials and SW could again become cost effective.
We have to bear in mind that SW has not increased the base price ever
so they are in effect getting $2971.24 in 1995 dollars for a seat
today. However, in 1995 they sold just a few thousand seats whereas
now they are selling 100,000s of seats per year. The cost of the
software doesn;t increase with increasing sales, only the cost of
copying and ****pping goes up. Even the cost of bugs doesn't go up
because there are (and this is hard to believe) only a finite number
of bugs.
Just hypothetically:
1995
Sell 5,000 seats in 1995 ($19,975,000)
Sell 4,000 maint. aggreements ($5,580,000)
New features weren't released or announced till they were considered
ready inside SW.
2008
Sell 200,000 seats ($594,200,000) in 1995 dollars
Sell 500,000 maint. aggreements ($518,760,000) in 1995 dollars
New features are promised and then never show up (like the ability to
save back a version).
It would be interesting to see what percentage of this gross income
went into development in 1995 versus 2008. And then Dassault got
their hooks into SW. At first they towed the line, but later I think
they really started pu****ng for returns.
Finally, Jimsym states that SW is still better than the competitors. I
wonder. Working with UG I have found that one thing is certain, when I
call in with a problem it gets solved then and there for me. SW
considers problems solved when an SPR is issued. And UG loads and
runs well on far less hardware than SW does. It may be a pain to use,
but given the number of times I have had to relearn SW, this steeper
learning curve doesn't look as bad as it once did.
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