PC maker Acer has accused Microsoft of shipping an inadequate low-end version of the upcoming Vista operating system to force more customers to move to the more expensive Vista Home Premium edition. Acer VP Jim Wong says that Microsoft’s own … Read More
software pricing
Oracle to Pay $98M Pricing Fine
Oracle agreed to pay a $98.5M fine, resulting from overcharging on government contracts by Oracle’s PeopleSoft subsidiary. (The overcharging took place before Oracle acquired PeopleSoft .) The government is always supposed to get the “best price”, but in some cases, … Read More
Windows Vista Prices Leak on Net
You can’t actually buy the long-delayed new operating system from Microsoft, but this week saw Vista prices revealed. First, the Microsoft Canada site posted prices in Canadian dollars earlier this week, then quickly took down the page, but not before … Read More
An Unusual Strategy for Software
An alert reader sent in this press release about Schott Systeme a CAD-CAM software vendor, which has held prices constant for a decade and does not charge for support. Annual support charges typically run about 20% of the license fee, … Read More
Another Way Not to Price Software
We’ve commented several times on the problems confronting software vendors who have historically priced their products on a per-CPU basis (see posts on Oracle and BEA), as technology has made the very concept of the CPU rather ambiguous. Now the … Read More