Quote:
Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni  Make good products, don't overprice them, treat your customers professionally and with humility and respect, and the market will reward you. |
Well, certainly there's no guarantee the market will reward you at all. Demand, "mindshare" and timing are tricky factors.
I do my best to be a good vendor for my customers. My partner and I are quickly and personally responsive to our customers, mainly through email. We've turned out bug fixes on a dime based on customer reports. Our customers seem to like that. Our approach works
at our size. It might not work for DxO, however; perhaps they've now got too many customers to provide that sort of service? I dunno. If customer support became a full-time job for me, it would certainly be a problem. Clearly, pretty much all large software companies gave up on providing customer support a long time ago: they either sell support services or they expect their customers to support each other, which seems a bit rude, dontchathink?
As for the "overpricing" you mention, well, that's rather subjective. I've received a few email lectures from people about the pricing of
my product. The gist of these lectures is always that I would sell "many more" copies of my product if it cost less.* Well, it's that definition of "many more" that worries me. I might sell more licenses if I lowered the price, but how many more? And how far would I need to lower it? (And what do I do for my existing customers who paid the original price?)
Maybe this example is illustrative (and maybe not?): After we shipped the original Mac-only edition of TrueGrain, we received a
deluge of email requests for a Windows version, several of which were pledges to buy the product if we came through. We took this outpouring as a reflection of demand and coughed up a Windows equivalent. Well, despite all the noise, virtually nobody bought the Windows version. Our customer base remains nearly exclusively Mac-based. Why? I can speculate, but I don't
know.
Meanwhile, I learned today of a counterfeit registration code that has been produced for my product. I was tempted—but will refrain from—inserting the animated GIF of the dancing banana to close this post.
Martin
*Some are also fond of pointing out that my product costs as much as Lightroom and half as much as a Photoshop license and how outrageous that is. It doesn't occur to them that if Lightroom had the potential market of my product—a comparatively simple niche product—Adobe would have to charge $150,000 per license. In other words, they wouldn't have bothered. It's a whole different ball game, but that isn't so obvious from the consumer angle.
Linear Mode
